For the rest of 1952 and early 1953 Ike Turner and his Kings Of Rhythm toured. They played Florida and may have recorded for Henry Stone in Miami but his remains unconfirmed. Ike was still contracted
to the Biharis but this didn't stop him recording two singles at Sun in July and August 1953.

This year saw the growth of the buy now pay later mentality with car makers leading the way by allowing longer and longer periods to pay for your new car. Queen Elizabeth II crowned queen of
England. The unions gained strength with more and more workers belonging to unions, with wage and price controls ended and unemployment at 2.9% the increases in standard of living continued to grow and appear to have no boundaries. A teachers average salary
was $4,254 and a pound of round steak was 90 cents. The first color television sets appear selling for $1,175, and transistor radios start to appear for sale.

1953

Clyde McPhatter leaves the Dominoes after three years and 9 huge hits to form the Drifters for Atlantic Records who will hit number 1 out of the box with "Money Honey" that summer.

The first clear evidence of soul music shows up
with the "5" Royales, an ex-gospel group that turned to racy rhythm and blues and in Faye Adams who's spiritual plea in a secular realm, "Shake A Hand" becomes an immediate rhythm and blues standard.

Bill Haley changes his group's name to the more
youthful Comets and writes the first white rock hit, "Crazy Man Crazy", reaching #13 on the Top Billboard Charts in May, the highest position for a rock song to date.

The Rhythm & Blues Charts begin to reflect the overwhelming dominance of emerging rock and
roll with such hits as Big Joe Turner's "Honey Hush", Johnny Ace's "The Clock" and Ruth Brown's "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean". Only one pure blues record tops the chart the entire year, a significant shift from past
years when blues had a steady presence on those charts.

15 million rhythm and blues records are bought in 1953, while that accounts for just 5% of all records sold it begins to draw notice in the industry which fails to note the growing interest
among young white audiences that will soon have a major impact on society as a whole.

A great year for the sanguine stylings of vocalist Eddie Fisher, whom Coca-Cola offered the unheard of sum of $1 million to be its corporate spokesman. Beloved by teens and
older folks alike, the pleasant-voiced tenor scored thirty-five songs in the Top 40 between 1950 and 1956. Along the way he would have five wives, including Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds. Also doing
well this year were the immortal Les Paul, the guitarist and recording studio innovator (one of the first to use multi-track recording), and the demure sex kitten singer Theresa Brewer.

One year after its launch, Sun rides high in the rhythm and blues
charts via Rufus Thomas' "Bear Cat".

1953

Soon after graduating
from high school in 1953, future Sun recording artist Harold Jenkins (aka Conway Twitty) went to Chicago to work on the line at International Harvester, supporting his first wife and their young son, Michael. The Philadelphia Phillies baseball club wanted
him, but the U.S. Army wanted him more.

If nothing else, Willie Carr demonstrates the capriciousness of the music business. On the evidence of just one song, ''Outside Friend'', he was as good as many of the artists on Union Avenue who sustained careers
in music. Instead, this is the only known recording.

Researcher
Bob Eagle asked around about Carr, finding out that he was in Greenville, Mississippi with Willie Love around 1950, and probably recorded ''Outside Friend'' for Sam Phillips in 1953 or 1954. When Eagle asked Walter Horton about Carr, Horton replied
that he'd seen him playing guitar around Grenada, Mississippi. That was in the early 1970s. Was it the same guy? From this distance, it's impossible to say.

STUDIO SESSION FOR WILLIE CARR

AT THE MEMPHIS RECORDING SERVICE FOR SUN RECORDS 1952/1953

SUN RECORDING STUDIO

706
UNION AVENUE, MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

SUN SESSION: UNKNOWN DATE 1952/1953

SESSION
HOURS: UNKNOWN

PRODUCER AND RECORDING ENGINEER - SAM PHILLIPS

Willie Carr was good. A disciple of Sonny Boy Williamson perhaps, but a worthy one. Someone as good as Carr should have made records, and that alone shows the capriciousness of the business.
What little we know of him is related in the artiest biographies, but we have no idea how or when he came to record this acetate at the Memphis Recording Service. Steve LaVere, who discovered the acetate, suggested 1952 or 1953. Without a band, he had to carry
the show on his own, and doesn't miss a beat or leave much dead air. His vocal is finely shaded, and his song appears to be original. It first appeared on a 1985 Krazy Kat LP, ''Memphis Blues: Unissued Titles From the 1950's''.

In case you missed Fowler's 1940s mega-hit "Gospel Boogie", here is its first cousin. Recorded some 15 years after
the original made the charts, the "Gospel Boogie" idea is still alive and kicking here. The brief guitar break here is a standout.

Sam Phillips recorded a young man just about his own age with one of the clearest and most beautiful voices Sam had ever heard. Howard Seratt was the twelfth of seventeen children, born on March 9, 1922, and raised on
a farm outside Manila, Arkansas, who had contracted polio before the age of two. Though he remained on crutches for the rest of his life, he never let his handicap limit him. He taught himself harmonica and guitar at an early age, sang in a hillbilly band
during the war, and then, after a religious conversation, turned to spiritual music exclusively. Which was how a Forrest City disc jockey named Larry Parker discovering him, singing and accompanying himself in a church in Mariana, and was so struck by his
talent that he got the idea of starting a record label just to put out records by Howard Seratt. So Larry brought Howard to Sam Phillips to record him, and they cut two titles, ''Make Room In The Life Boat For Me'' and ''Jesus Means All To Me'', which Parker
put out on his newly formed St. Francis label. Sam had tried halfheartedly at that time to persuade Seratt to record some secular songs, but it was clear Howard was not going to deviate from his beliefs, and Sam was the last person in the world to try to impose
his vision on another. In later years Howard Seratt was a highly skilled watchmaker, who owned Howard's Jewelry Store in San Jacinto, California. The local newspaper had written him up as Businessman of the week in March 1971, revealing the story of a
well-liked pillar of the religious and business community, without even mentioning Howard's other career in music.

The name Howard Seratt had been an intriguing imprint on the label of an obscure Sun 78rpm for some years. There had only been one Sun record because Sam Phillips had wanted Howard
to reach a bigger market through singing country songs, and Howard's strongly-felt religious views had prevented him from taking that route. As far as other recordings, it turned out that two other songs had been recorded at Sun and issued on a custom
label, St. Francis. In later years, Howard Seratt had made some more country gospel recordings in California, just for his own amusement.

From
the very first harmonica notes it is clear that this is going to be no ordinary record. It is not that harmonica players were a rarity in the mid-South, for Howard Seratt is merely adapting the music of Lonnie Glosson and Wayne Raney who had been firm radio
favorites for many years. Indeed, it was Wayne Raney's pals, the Delmore Brothers, who originated ''Make Room In The Lifeboat For Me'' recording it for Decca in 1940. It has more to do with the reassuringly solid execution of both guitar and harmonica styles
and the convincing tone in which Howard delivers the moving lyrics. This recording was made in 1953 by Sam Phillips as a custom order for the short-lived St. Francis label of Forrest City, Arkansas. It would not be long before Sam Phillips would invite Howard
back to record for Sun.

Howard Seratt actually recorded
and released another single at his own expense, at the time of his first (and only) SUN release. The U-49 and U-50 matrix numbers and the vinyl trail-off etchings, shows that the record was manufactured at the same time and place as the SUN release.
In fact, SUN 198 indeed has the words 'St Francis' etched into the trail-off grooves, indicating that it wasn't intended for SUN use.

On ''Jesus Means All To Me'', again adapting the harmonica style of Lonnie Glosson and Wayne Raney, this time
at a brighter tempo, Howard Seratt leads into another deeply felt religious message that is so attractively delivered and yet so disarming as to momentarily convert even the most confirmed of atheists.

It is at this faster pace that one can particularly see the reason why Sam Phillips was so taken with Howard's music and so anxious to open negotiations with him about the possibility of recording of some secular music.

As for the man himself, Howard Seratt turned out to be a highly skilled watchmaker who owned Howard's Jewelry Store in San Jacinto. The local newspapers had written him up as Businessman of the week in March 1971,
revealing the story of a well-liked pillar of the religious and business community, without even mentioning Howard's other career in music.

"Another man from around that time was the crippled gospel singer, Howard Seratt", recalled Sam Phillips. "Now Howard had probably one of the best voices I've ever heard. But he would
only do religious music and I just didn't have the market for that. I thought he was so good that I issued the record anyway".

Name (Or. No. Of Instruments)

Howard Seratt - Vocal, Guitar and Harmonica

Howard Serett was a throwback to an earlier era. Sam Phillips still vividly recalls Seratt, a crippled country
gospel singer from Manila, Arkansas. ''Oh that man! I never heard a person, no matter what category of music, could sing as beautifully. The honesty, the integrity, the communication... That unpretentious quality. His music just had a depth of beauty about
it in its simplicity''. Phillips asserted that he would have loved to have recorded Seratt indefinitely, but Seratt remembers that there was a rider attached to that offer; he would have to record secular music, which he was unwilling to do.

By 1953 Roy Orbison and his band,
got their own show on KERB sponsored by local businessmen one day a week before school. The Wink Westerner's first appearance was at one of the school assemblies. They were also featured on the KERB Jamboree on Saturday afternoons with local Country & Western bands.

The first songs they played were "Kaw-liga", "Mexican Joe", "Caribbean", and "Under the Double Eagle". But they were not only country, little by little they began playing and making string arrangements for Big-Band standards and instrumentals like "In The Mood" or "Little Brown Jug"
as well as Pop standards.

During
the summer, Orbison would work for the County shoving tar, or work in the oil fields chopping steel or painting water towers. He used to be part of the marching band and singing
octet, and at some point or another tried to play the baritone horn. He even had become the manager of Wink High school's Kittens football team in 1952.

The Orioles' "Crying in the Chapel" is the first black hit to top the white pop charts.

Leo Fender invents the Stratocaster guitar.

Sam Phillips or Marion Keisker records the first Elvis Presley record on July, in his Sun studio of Memphis using two recorders to produce an effect of "slapback" audio delay.

The black market constitutes 5.7% of the total American market
for records.

Vee-Jay Records is founded in Indiana, is owned by James and Vivian Bracken, specializing in black
music.

JANUARY 1953

By mid-January Sam Phillips and Jim Bulleit they were in
business and Sun Records is re-launched with the singles ''Got My Application Baby'' b/w ''Trouble (Will Bring You Down)'' Sun 177 by Handy Jackson; ''We All Gotta Go Sometime'' b/w ''She
May Be Yours (But She Comes To See Me Sometime)'' Sun 178 by Joe Hill Louis and ''Baker Shop Boogie'' b/w ''Seems Like A Million Years'' Sun 179 by Willie Nix. Distribution is organized by
Jim Bulleit, owner of Delta and J.B Records, and former owner of Nashville-based Bullet Records. Sam Phillips
now ceases to record music for license to other labels and concentrates on developing Sun.

There was a moment when Sam Phillips was prepared to defer to Bulleit's more established name in the industry and wondered
if they should call their new venture Bullet Records, but when he found out that the ''Bullet'' name was tied up by Bulleit's original partners, he wrote that after thinking it over, he believed ''Sun'' ''to be as good as any other label name we could conjure
up and I, of course, have had the art work done and have got three electro-plates that we can use, and, then we can save $50..00 or $60.00 and too can get labels immediately''.

The
initial release that Sam Phillips had in mind was going to be three solid blues efforts, the sides by Charles Thomas, a vocal and an instrumental by West Memphis blues personality Willie Nix, and two sides from Joe Hill Louis sessions with pianist Albert Williams
and Nix on drums. At the last minute, though, Sam changed his mind. ''You will note that I have changed the flip side of Nix's number'', he wrote to Jim Bulleit on January 15, ''and put another vocal instead of the instrumental''. Also, instead of the Charles
Thomas, he had decided to release ''a number by a boy I do not know'', Handy Jackson's ''Trouble (Will Bring You Down)'', a slow ''crying'' blues with a blurry overamplified sound that seemingly had little to recommend it other than Sam's instant and instinctive
feeling for it. ''I really believe in this number'', he wrote to Bulleit immediately after recording it in the midst of a session that featured pianist and vocalist Gay Garth, following up several days later by stressing that Jackson, a singer with whom prior
to the session Garth himself was altogether unfamliliar, was the one he was ''banking on''. Sun Records was reborn.

The next few weeks were a whirlwind of activity and practical
advice. Jim Bulleit advised Sam Phillips to make sure he numbered his invoices consecutively, to be aware that while 78s remained the dominant format in the southern rhythm and blues marked, 45s were making rapid inroads and Sam should be prepared to start
their manufacture in significant numbers at some point soon. Jim Bulleit offered to put Charles Thomas out on his own label if Sam liked, almost as if Sun and J-B Records were two branches of the same business. Jim educated Sam about the federal excise tax,
a 10 percent surcharge on manufacturing costs that was a holdover from the war years and that added 4.2 cents to the cost of every record you pressed, regardless of how many you sold. Since Jim Bulleit was going to own the publishing on all of the songs they
recorded, Sam Phillips should get a co-write on as many of them as possible. Jim and Sam needed to squeeze every penny that they could out of every record that they released if they wanted to survive. Jim could speak from experience, it was going to be a very
tight squeeze.

JANUARY 1953

Teenager and future Sun recording artist,
Narvel Felts had moved with his parents to Powe, Missouri in 1953 and he went to school in Bernie where, early in 1956, Felts was in a high school talent contest.

JANUARY 1, 1953 THURSDAY

Hank Williams dies in the backseat of his Cadillac on New Years Day. The circumstances of Williams's death
are still controversial. Many believe he died from a mix of alcohol and morphine. Some have claimed that Williams was dead before leaving
Knoxville. Oak Hill is still believed to be the place where Williams died, but one of the more plausible theories states that Williams died in his sleep about 20 to 30 minutes before his car arrived in Oak Hill. There is a monument dedicated to his memory across the street from the gas station where Carr sought help.
The Cadillac in which Williams died is now preserved at the Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery, Alabama.

Justin Tubb attends the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, where the Texas Longhorns shut out the Tennessee Volunteers 16-0.

Marvin Rainwater writes ''Hearts Hall Of Fame''. The next day, it becomes the first song
he recorded.

JANUARY 2, 1953 FRIDAY

Marvin Rainwater holds his first recording session, cutting his debut single, ''Hearts Hall
Of Fame'', at the Ben Adelman Studio in Washington, D.C. The backing band includes Roy Clark on guitar.

Catherine Yvonne Stone is born in Montgomery, Alabama. In a protracted legal dispute as an adult, she proves she's the daughter of Hank Williams, by Bobbie W. Jett. She subsequently uses the stage name Jett Williams.

JANUARY 7, 1953 WEDNESDAY

The Presley's moved into a small house at 698 Saffarans Avenue (398 Cypress
Street). It was a small apartment house in which - for $52-a-month rent - they secured two downstairs rooms. It was easy to understand
why the living situation at 698 Saffarans Avenue depressed Elvis Presley. In theory, 698 Saffarans Avenue was a step from Lauderdale Courts public housing because the rent was higher and the Presley's no longer had to go through the ritual of qualifying for low-income housing. The Saffarans Avenue apartment
was disastrous. It was a small unit desperately in need of paint, new plumbing, and adequate lighting. There were other reasons
for Elvis' unhappiness with his new surrounding. each morning he arose and complained about the squalid sanitary conditions. The common bathroom was down the hall, and Elvis Presley found it cold and dirty. The water was never hot and the bathtub was always filled with hair. His experiences at this apartment
created an aversion to bathing, and Elvis Presley showered only when absolutely necessary. He cultivated the habit of purchasing
large bottles of Aqua Velva after-shave, and splashed the lotion all over his body. The result was a disconcerting smell, a cross between body odour and lilacs. The real reason that the
family moved was because, the income has rice to more than $4,000 annually, $1,500 above the limit to live in the public housing project.

Days after Hank Williams' death, Joni James recorded a hit pop version of ''Your Cheatin' Heart'' at the Universal Studios in Chicago.

JANUARY 8, 1953 THURSDAY

Elvis Presley's parents give him a $50 Lincoln for his 18th birthday. His mother doesn't know how to drive, and he becomes her chauffeur.

Just one week after Hank Williams' death, his window, Billie Jones Williams, blasts Hank's mother, ''She is
trying to cheat me out of everything, but I think she will fail''.

One
week after the passing of a legend, Jack Cardwell recorded the tribute hit ''The Death Of Hank Williams'' in Mobile, Alabama.

JANUARY 12, 1953 MONDAY

Kitty
Wells recorded ''Paying For That Back Street Affair'', at the Tulan Hotel's Castle Studio in Nashville.

By now future Sun recording artist
Luke McDaniel was appearing on local artist, Jack Cardwell's T.V. Show. Jack was already recording for King Records and ironically did have a hit with a Hank Williams tribute disc, "The Death of Hank Williams". Jack introduced Luke to producer Bernie
Pearlman and later, Syd Nathan, the owner of King Records. Nathan signed Luke to King and the new partnership licked off with a very Hank Williams inspired session in June 1953. Recording for one of the biggest Independants certainly helped Luke
to secure many more shows, along with radio and TV appearances all through the South.

Sun Records is re-launched with three blues discs. Sam Phillips now ceases to record music for license to other labels and concentrates on developing Sun Records.

JANUARY 1953

A more concerted effort to break into the black gospel held was made by Sam's brother Jud, who started the Sun Spot label In Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Some of the releases
by the Sun Spot Quartet carried a spoken introduction from Jud and were almost certainly recorded by Sam in Memphis. Marion Keisker recalled that the label was launched at the time Elvis Presley came into
Sun to record his first personal disc, which would place it in 1953. There were at least four releases on Sun Spot, and it may have been seen as a companion label to Sun; but little more is known of the venture than the music
contained on those records.

Although he has made far less of a mark on history
than his brother, Jud Phillips was no stranger to the music business. Perhaps best known for his own Judd label (started in 1958), Jud was an essential part of Sun's earliest success, working behind the scene with disc jockeys and distributors. But
before there was even a Memphis Recording Service, Jud Phillips was actively involved in gospel music. By the early 1950s, Jud and Dean Phillips were living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Dean recalls, "We were both very involved with gospel music
when we met and married. Jud was booking and MCing shows. He managed the Sun Spot Quartet and I played piano when they performed".

Through his involvement with Sun, Jud had become familiar with the workings of the record business. Recording the Sun Spot Quartet seemed the next obvious step. However, brother Sam was skeptical about their sales potential. Undeterred,
Jud started his own label, which bare the name of the Quartet. The choice of name seemed natural enough.

Sam already had an emerging record company (although still pre-Elvis) with a related name. Perhaps equally important was the fact that Jud owned the Mississippi distributorship for Sun Spot Orange
- an extremely popular soft drink in the south. The bottling plant that Jud's father-in-law had set up for him and working for the Petal Water and Sewer Company. Dean Phillips notes, "They didn't finance the label at all, but they were
quite happy to see the name of their product on those records".

Dean Phillips, who played piano or organ on all the Sun Spot recordings, recalls a total of 16 sides being recorded at 706 Union and is certain that eight
singles were released. The records were almost certainly pressed in very limited quantity and distributed largely in and around Mississippi. Numbering began with Sun Spot 1000 and - if Dean's recollection is correct - may have reached 1007, although
1005 is the highest number accounted for. There were no other releases on the Sun Spot label. Jud and Dean Phillips' involvement in gospel music did not end with Sun Spot.

Several years later, Jud managed and Dean provided piano accompaniment for a Quartet featuring
Troy Daniel and gospel legend Jake Hess. Perhaps most intriguing about the Sun Spot records are the spoken introductions offered by Jud, himself.

Not all selections included this feature, which provide a glimpse of Jud's MCing technique when the quartet was on
the road. On this only track, which the entire personnel (including Jud's wife) was introduced. According to Dean, singer George West was last known to be living in Jackson, Mississippi, and Gerald Howell in Nashville.

C.M. Lingle died a number of years ago and bass singer Bill Wilson passed away during the Fall of 1999, just
a month before learning that his music from nearly half a century ago was to be reissued.

In 1969, the Sun tapes were shipped from Memphis to Nashville. Some of the tapes boxes
were falling apart and many of the old 7-inch tape reels were spliced together to create new 10'' reels. Some of the old reels were copied onto new reels as well. Teddy Paige of the Jesters did some of this work, as did researcher Steve LaVere. Someone copied
an apparently unmarked tape with ''Got Me A Horse And Wagon'' and two other songs onto the end of a Houston Stokes reel. It was probably Paige who wrote ''Roscoe... good against Got Me A Horse And Wagon''. When Martin Hawkins and Colin Escott compiled the
Sun discography in 1987, they didn't hear the tape and took their word for it, attributing this song to Gordon. Later, Martin and Hank Davis issued the song in their Blues Archive series on Charly Records and decided that, because the tape box said ''Rosco
and Erskine'' and this song was on a reel with Houston Stokes, the singer must be Stokes' guitarist, Erskine McClellan. Now, on further review, there are several compelling reasons why this isn't from Stokes' session.

First, the ensemble is different... notably lacking
a guitar; second, the musicians on this song are nowhere near as good as the slumming jazz men on Stokes' tape with McClellan; and third, Stokes' session was held in 1952 and this song talks about 1952 and maybe even 1953 in the past tense. Our current best
guess is that LaVere and Paige were half right: it truly does sound like Rosco Gordon's band, and it even sounds as if Rosco himself might be on piano. Who is singing? We have no idea. Why didn't Rosco sing if it's band? Possibly because he was under contract
to Duke or RPM. One certainly: this is a fine song that places an exclamation point at the end of the car song.

Sun's false dawn in April 1952 produced just one commercial issued record
and two intended releases that somehow never made it to the retail counters. Sun 177 was the second Sun record, issued at the end of January 1953 along with discs by Joe Hill Louis and Willie Nix. The flow of records ended fifteen years later in January 1968.

Frustratingly, there remains
some mystery about the singer and about the attribution of both sides of this disc to Handy Jackson. Sam Phillips logged ''Got My Application'' by a man named Gay Garth, and in 1984 he told Martin Hawkins that he ''remembered'' Gay Garth as ''a local musician
who had potential for making both blues and jazz''. Sam said that he ''did not recall'' Handy Jackson and, surprisingly, couldn't remember why the recording appeared as by Jackson. At first, he said Garth was Jackson, and then he said he wasn't sure. When
Gaylord Garth was finally interviewed in 2004, he confirmed that he was indeed the singer and pianist on this song but he didn't know Jackson's name. He recorded ''Application'' with another song, ''Screamin' And Cryin''', at the end of the session where he
was part of a band led by saxophonist Willie Wilkes, Garth and Wilkes were employed to back a singer who was not part of their band and whose name Garth had forgotten.

This was one of three Sun singles issued on January 30, 1953, as the re-launch programme. It features the typical over amplification of the rhythm section
- and, like the first Sun release, showcases the music of a local artist of whom Sam Phillips thought highly. Sam recalled seeing potential for both jazz and blues in Handy Jackson (real name Gay Garth) although he could recall little else about
the band, whose qualities are not fully obvious from his straightforward city blues. Jackson brings an appealing and anguished vocal to the slightly obscure lyric, and there is a plaintive quality to the saxophone work.

02
- "SCREAMIN' AND CRYING*" - B.M.I.

Composer: - Unknown

Publisher: - Copyright Control

Matrix number: - None - Sun Unissued

Recorded: - Unknown Date January 1953

There are several subtle differences between this newly-discovered alternate take of ''Trouble'', and its issued counterpart. The guitar is up in the mix on the issued version but almost inaudible
here. After the sax break, Jackson changes his phrasing on ''getting late in the evening...''. On this version he adopts the sly insinuation of Percy Mayfield; he's more full-throated on the record. But we're still as much in the dark about who Handy Jackson
was and how he happened to be at Sun in 1953. It certainly sounds like Johnny London on the screaming alto sax but London swears it's not him, as did Gaylord Garth, who played piano on the song. If the grave marked Handy Jackson that Jim O'Neal discovered
in Leflore County, Mississippi holds our man, it holds the story of this recording, too.

After the trails of getting one record onto the marked in 1952, Sun was
effective launched in January 1953 with three releases. This is the least known. Jackson was apparently a local bandleader who sings on "Trouble (Will Bring You Down". The vocal on "Got My Application Baby" however, is credited to one Gay Garth who
may or may not be the same person. The other band members remain unidentified. They play in an earthier style than Johnny London, but still some way removed from the delta blues of Joe Hill Louis.

Piano leads off this slow blues song with some passion
by Handy Jackson. An alto sax plays a florid obbligato throughout the song and struggles manfully through a solo chorus that is muddied by the rest of the band giving it what for in the middle register. The three verses struggle without success to
avoid cliche: "I laid awake last night watching the stars go by/our heart will ache with pain when your baby says goodbye". Although issued along side Joe Hill Louis relaunch’s Sun, Jackson never recorded
again.

Handy Jackson is the name of the artist and songwriter shown on the label of Sun 177. Despite the fact that his was one of the releases selected to relaunch the Sun label
in January 1953, precious little is known about Handy Jackson other than he was a local musician, who fronted his own tight rhythm and blues combo. However, we do know now that the singer on one side of the disc was named Gay Garth and
the rest of the story is to be found under his name.

By
coincidence, while exploring one of the graveyards in Leflore Country, Mississippi, where Robert Johnson was allegedly buried (but apparently was not, given subsequent discoveries). Than Jim O'Neal found a headstone for Handy Jackson,
but according to census data he would have been 47 years old at the time of the Sun disc. Several other people with the same name, can be found in censuses. Then again, just possibly, the name could relate to the family of Al Jackson,
who often played in Memphis at the Club Handy.

Gaylord ''Gay'' Garth for over five decades Gaylord Garth went
about his business not knowing he had appeared on Sun Records under anothers name, and for those same decades record collectors and music historians went about their business not knowing that the singer on an ultra-rare disc credited to Handy
Jackson was living and working in Chicago, singing and playing weekends in night clubs on the South Side where he was known as ''The Arkansas Belly Roller''. Then, fifty years after Garth's appearance in Sam Phillips studio and the release
of Sun 177, ''Got My Application Baby'' and ''Trouble (Will Bring You Down)'', there appeared a picture in Juke Blues magazine captioned ''Gaylord Garth'', the Arkansas Belly Roller''. This just had to be the man Sam Phillips had entered
into his notebook as Gay Garth.

Sam Phillips' logbook
gave Garth's name, his address in Memphis of 131 Essex Street, and noted that Garth had recorded two songs on a 16 inch acetate. He did not record the date of the session but he did note that one of the songs, ''Got My Application Baby'',
was issued on January 30, 1953 on Sun 177 along with a different, third, song titled ''Trouble'', after which he put the name Handy Jackson in brackets. When Sun 177 was pressed the name of the performer on both sides was shown as Handy
Jackson and there was no mention of Gay Garth at all.

So when
Juke Blues arranged for Davis Whiteis to talk to Gaylord Garth about his former life in Memphis it meant that all the mystery were about to be resolved, or were they? Garth remembered recording as a pianist with a band behind another
vocalist and he remembered making a couple of vocal tracks himself, but he didn't have any idea who Handy Jackson was.

Gaylord Garth was born in Marianna, Arkansas on December 8, 1924 into a farming community. He told Whiteis he picked cotton alongside M.T. Murphy, who later played guitar behind
him many iconic blues singers and gained latter-day fame through the Blues Brothers movie. In his teens Garth fooled around with the guitar and some home-made instruments and then he learned to play piano while he was in the Navy in the
mid-1940s. His musical interest focused on Count Basie, Pete Johnson, Joe Turner, and Jimmy Rushing, ''not that gutbucket'' blues, he said. He remember coming to Memphis when he left the Navy, hanging out and playing with various groups:
''I started music in 1949 after I got out of the Navy the first time. I had got so I could carry the piano beat. I played C, G, and F, the keys I could play in''. He was playing with saxophonist Willie Wilkes at a club in Marianna when
B.B. King heard him play and apparently decided to add Garth to his emerging group. ''I stayed with him a long time. I had joined the Naval (Reserve) and when the war started back up with Korea they called me back in the Navy, that was
1951''.

Garth felt that he made his first recordings at Phillips'
studio before he went back into the Navy, but he also said of recording, ''I didn't know nothing about that stuff. I was dumb to the facts. I'd just gotten out of the Navy''. That would place the session in late 1952 or January 1953 rather
than 1950 or 1951. Whatever the date, Garth was then pianist in a band with Willie Wilkes and he described the day, ''They didn't tell me we was going to a session. I hadn't rehearsed nothing. We were just going to back up someone, someone
who wasn't a regular member of the band''. Then, he was asked to sing by a man he remembered as Billy Shaw of the New York booking agency, ''just looking for the country style blues... (Shaw) said, 'we want to hear you' but I didn't have
no material''. As Shaw booked Rosco Gordon, it is at least possible that he was in Sam Phillips' studio the day Garth was there. Garth said one of the songs he sang was made up during the session, a song he called ''Screamin''. Sam Phillips
noted that he had got ''2 number on 16 inch e.t. ''Got My Application'' and ''Screamin' And Cryin'''. When Phillips issued ''Application'' at the end of January 1953 it was backed not by ''Sreamin''' but by Jackson's ''Trouble'', and
possibly this was the unremembered song and singer Garth had been asked to back up on piano at the session? Garth felt that the other musicians on the session were Wilkes on tenor sax, Richard Williams on alto sax, Robert Carter on guitar
and William Cooper on drums.

Sometime in 1953 Garth moved to
Gary, Indiana, but returned briefly to Memphis before moving to Chicago to find work. He worked in a hospital kitchen and then a Ford dealership ''loadin' up trucks and all that'' where he stayed until he retired. During the late 1950s
and 1960s he led a small band in which he sang and played electric piano. The band, the Gay-Tones, included saxophonist Ernest Cotton from Memphis who had recorded with Eddie Boyd and Memphis Slim and made a disc in his own name on Chicago's
JOB label. From the late 1960s onwards, Garth gave up his group and just sat in as a guest musician, often on harmonica, and guest singer. He was also in some demand to perform his trademark belly rolls, guaranteed to cause a stir among
the ladies. In 2004 at a Chicago area club, Lee's Unleaded, David Whiteis was still able to witness Garth and ''his impishly lascivious stage act, primal harp squalls, and still potent baritone holler''. All these activities came to a
halt on September 13, 2010 when Garth died in his adopted city of Chicago.

JANUARY 14, 1953 WEDNESDAY

Roy Rogers is the surprise subject of NBC-TV's ''This Is Your Life''. During the show, he's persuaded to sing ''Tumbling Tumbleweeds' with The Sons Of The Pioneers.

JANUARY 15, 1953 THURSDAY

''Winning Of The West'' debuts in movie theaters with a musical collaboration of future Country Music Hall of Famers, as Gene Autry songs written by Fred Rose and Cindy Walker. Seen on
the screen, Smiley Burnette and Frankie Marvis

Columbia released
George Morgan's ''(I Just Had A Date0 Lover's Quarrel''.

JANUARY
16, 1953 FRIDAY

Bill Monroe suffers 19 broken bones in a head-on
collision in Highway 31 near White House, Tennessee. He still manages to get out of the car and pull another passenger, Bessie Lee Mauldin, out of the other side. Monroe is unable to tour until May.

JANUARY 17, 1953 SATURDAY

Less than two weeks after Hank Williams was interred at the Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery, Alabama, his coffin is dug up and moved to a new site.

JANUARY 18, 1953 SUNDAY

Jim Reeves recorded his first single, ''Mexican Joe'' at the KWKH Studios in Shreveport, Louisiana.

JANUARY 19, 1953 MONDAY

Marty Robbins becomes a member of the Grand Ole Opry, the same day he moves to Nashville from Arizona.

The Memphis draft board added Elvis Presley's name to the bottom of it's list on January 19, 1952. Eleven days after his 18th birthday, Presley, then in his last year of Humes High School
in Memphis, fulfilled his legal requirement to register for selective service. It's doubtful that the action concerned Elvis much at the time, as he knew there were thousands of names on the draft board's register that would be called before his.

The double-sided card stock "Selective Service" number is 40-86-35-16 and was
signed by Elvis Presley and Crace F. Martony in blue ink. Card issued to Elvis Aron Presley at 698 Saffarans in Memphis, Tennessee. Lists birthdate of Jan. 8, 1935 and birthplace of Tupelo, Miss. Back of the card lists personal information:
brown hair, green eyes, height of 5"11" and weight of 150. Selective Service number ''40-86-35-16''. The card is 2 1/2x3 3.4 inches.

Dwight
D. Eisenhower was inaugurated as the United States president during January of 1953. Republican Eisenhower and his running mate Richard Nixon defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson with a total of 442 electoral votes to 89 and a popular vote of 55.2 percent to
44.3 percent. Eisenhower had previously been known for his service as a five-star general during World War II, eventually becoming the Supreme Allied Commander. He also acted as a Chief of Staff for the Army under President Truman, the governor of U.S. occupied
Germany after WWII, the president of Columbia University and the Supreme Commander of NATO forces. During his two-term presidency he was credited with creating the U.S. highway system, strengthening Social Security, easing tensions with the U.S.S.R., creating
NASA, helping to fully desegregate the Armed Forces, and signing some of the first modern civil rights laws.

Dorothy Shay,
the Park Avenue Hillbilly, performs at one of Dwight Eisenhower's inaugural balls in Washington, D.C. Sid Caesar, Fred Waring and Abbott and Costello also perform for an audience that includes vice president Richard Nixon.

JANUARY 20, 1953 TUESDAY

Coral
released Tommy Sosebee's only country hit, ''Till I Waltz Again With You''.

JANUARY 1, 1953 WEDNESDAY

Sam Phillips had barely had time to settle into the new house at 1028 McEvers Circle in Memphis. It was the first house he had ever owned, purchased
for a little more than $10,000, with $2,000 he had been able to set aside from his Chess Records hits serving as the down payment. It was a modest gabled bungalow with a small front porch and an attached garage in a postwar Levittown-like development out by
Kennedy veterans' hospital, the same neighborhood in which he and Becky had lived when they first moved to Memphis and boarded briefly in that nice lady from Sheffield's home. There were just two bedrooms and a single bathroom at the end of the hall, and it
sat on a corner lot, giving them a nice yard, but for Becky it would not have mattered if it had been more modest by far. It was their first real home.

JANUARY 24, 1953 SATURDAY

Carl
Perkins married Valda Crider from Corinth, Mississippi. They moved to a government housing project in Jackson, Tennessee as the children started appearing. However, Valda encouraged Carl to work on his music and try for a career
in entertainment. Her support has nourished Perkins though a long career as a musician and through many bouts with the bottle and self doubt. In fact, it was Val who heard a record on the radio that would alter the course of
Perkins' career.

Just weeks after his death, Hank Williams hits
number 1 with the prophetic ''I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive''.

JANUARY
26, 1953 MONDAY

Lucinda Williams is born in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Her laidback snapshots of Southern life make her a significant figure in the alternate country movement. She also writes Mary Chapin Carpenter's mainstream-country hit ''Passionate Kisses''.

Joe and Rose Lee Maphis sign with Columbia Records.

JANUARY 27, 1953 TUESDAY

Keyboard player Lee Carroll is born in Glasgow, Kentucky. Carrol replaces Marlon Hargis in Exile in 1985, contributing to such hits as ''It'll Be Me'', ''She's Too Good To Be True'' and ''I Can't Get Close Enough''.

Hank Thompson recorded a version of Bill Carlisle's ''No Help Wanted'' at radio station
WKY in Oklahoma City.

Singwriter Tom Douglas is born in Atlanta,
Georgia. He authors such hits as Lady Antebellum's ''I Run To You'', Tim McGraw's ''Southern Voice'' and Miranda Lambert's ''The House That Built Me''.

JANUARY 29, 1953 THURSDAY

Drummer Louie Perez is born in East Los Angeles. He joins Los Lobos and co-writes ''Will The Worlf Survive'', a country hit for Waylon Jennings in 1986.

JANUARY 30, 1953 FRIDAY

Less than a month after his death, MGM released Hank Williams' ''Your Cheatin' Heart'' and ''Kaw-Liga''.

After Sun Records is re-launched three singles were released on this day, just two weeks after the partnership with Jim Bulleit had informally commenced. Despite Sam Phillips'
strong feeling about it, the Handy Jackson (Sun 177) passed almost unnoticed, by both the marketplace and posterity. The two that accompanied it, however, Joe Hill Louis' ''She May Be Yours (But She Comes To See Me Sometimes) (Sun 178) and Willie Nix, The
Memphis Blues Boy's ''Seems Like A Million Years'' (Sun 179) were everything that Sam Phillips had ever promised himself he would deliver.

The Joe Hill Louis record was not dissimilar to other Joe Hill Louis sides, reflecting both his singular strengths and his endearing weaknesses. It was the product of two sessions, November
17, 1952 and December 8, 1952, in which Louis' guitar and harmonica took the lead, but Willie Nix's drums on ''She May Be Yours'', and Albert Williams' piano on both sides, provided a rhythmic solidarity that Joe could not always summon in his more commonplace
one-man-band setting. Both sides showcased the unique joie de vivre of Sam Phillips' first discovery (actually, as Sam himself would have pointed out, Joe Hill Louis was a clear case of the artist discovering him), but it was the A-side, ''She May Be Yours'',
a medium-tempo boogie with a heavy beat, squalling harmonica solos, and the rough vocal bleeding purposefully through the harmonica mike, that revealed the way in which even when much of what Joe sang was taken from traditional sources, it reflected, Sam said,
something ''very personal to him''

The Willie Nix numbers were
even more distinctive, as befitted a proud free spirit referred to by one fellow bluesman as ''a little aviatic''. The single was the product of an October 2, 8, 9, 1952 session which Sam had originally submitted to Chess and presented the same quartet format
as the Joe Hill Louis , only this time requiring two musicians (Nix's versatile guitarist, Joe Willie Wilkins, and seventeen-year-old harmonica player James Cotton, another West Memphis regular, who had already recorded for Sam Phillips with Howlin' Wolf to
fill in for Louis' guitar-harmonica combination.

THE PERKINS BROTHERS BAND - There can be little doubt that Carl's older brother Jay and his younger brother Clayton would never
have thought of a career in music had it not been for constant badgering from Carl. He wanted a backup group, and his two brothers were the prime candidates. The choice of venues available to the brothers was limited, virtually
confined to church socials and honky-tonks, the Perkins Brothers Band gravitated naturally toward the latter.

Jay Perkins handled some of the vocals, singing in a rough-hewn voice modeled on Ernest Tubb's. But it was Carl who was both principal vocalist and lead guitarist. By 1954 their repertoire
included a fair of sampling of hillbilly standards: ''Always Late (With Your Kisses'', Jealous Heart'', ''Honky Tonk Blues'', and the inevitable ''Lovesick Blues''; there was also a little pop music, in the shape of ''I'll Walk Alone'',
and a pointer toward the future ''Carl's Boogie''. Thousands of bands in similar dives across the the mid-South were playing an identical repertoire. From among their number, the Perkins Brothers Band found themselves at the
top of the pop charts two of years later.

The reason revolves around Perkins himself and the nature of his music.
By 954 he had evolved a unique style, not pure honky-tonk music but a hybrid that borrowed much in terms of feeling, phrasing, and rhythm from black music. ''I just speeded up some of the slow blues licks'', said Carl. ''I
put a little speed and rhythm to what Uncle John had slowed down. That's all. That's what rockabilly music or rock and roll was to began with: a country with a black man's rhythm. Someone once said that everything's been done before -
and it has. It's just a question of figuring out a good mixture of it to sound original''.

The honky-tonks were also a good glace to experiment Mistakes would go unnoticed, and by listening to the audience Perkins could determine the type of music that went over best. One of his first moves was
to bring in a drummer. Drums, of course, were forbidden on the Grand Ole Opry, but Perkins decided that he needed them to reinforce the rhythm and keep it danceable. His first drummer, Tony Austin, lasted no more than a few gigs in 1953.
He was replaced by W S. ''Fluke'' Holland, originally from Saltillo, Mississippi, who had gone to school in Jackson with Clayton Perkins. Not only did he show real promise, he was able to buy a set of Brecht drums and - just
as important - a reliable automobile for the group. Holland frequented many of the black nightclubs in town because, as a drummer working in country music, he had few role models.

With a steady backbeat maintained by the bass and drums, Perkins would accentuate the rhythm by hitting the bass
strings of his electric guitar while he sang. He also developed the technique of singing and playing fills around his vocal, in the manner of a blues singer. Like most singers, Perkins was looking for a compatible lead guitarist who would
complement his work with tasty fills, and he found the most compatible lead guitarist of all in himself. He would use the little runs on the guitar as extensions of his vocal lines, working a dialogue with himself, scatting
a line and then completing it with a lick on the guitar. His finesse was probably wasted upon most of his clientele, but Perkins evidently did not care. He worked hard on his music, for he saw in it a deliverance from an otherwise bleak
future as a barely educated country boy trying to scratch out a living in Jackson.

Between 1953 and 1955 most of Perkins' income came from working at the Colonial Bakery in Jackson. The honky-tonks paid only two or three dollars a night, but they enabled the Perkins brothers to practice
their music and cultivate their drinking habits at minimal cost. ''I would mix beer with whiskey'', wrote Perkins in his autobiography (published by an evangelical publishing house), ''and, with soul on fire, I'd stand on the table tops
striving for the attention I thought my music deserved. The booze was free at most of the places I played at and it eased the pressure. My intentions seemed good. I wanted to try and help the drunks, give them some happiness,
maybe a little hope. But I was in the Devil's playground and it wasn't long before some old boy would shout, 'Gíve that Carl another drink and he'll really pick and sing'''.

SPRING 1953

The singing group that became the Prisonaires was formed sometimes after 1940, the year that tenor singer Ed Thurman and baritone singer William Stewart were sentenced to join the inmates of the Tennessee State Penitentiary in north east Nashville.

By May 6, 1953, when 17 year old Johnny Bragg was sent there with multiple life sentences for rape. Thurman
and Stewart were leading one of several loosely aggregated and nameless singing groups whiling away their time in the Pen.

Bragg was a budding tenor himself but it was
a little while before Thurman asked him to join the group, several years before Bragg became the lead tenor, and several more before the group had a name. Bragg later told researcher Bill Millar ''I joined a group back
in 1944, and I didn't know too much about background singing at the time but I just went in there and started singing, and the people who had said I didn't know about singing, they said you know everything' …and I became the
lead tenor singer. I guess it was just a gift from God''.

Johnny Bragg's biographer, Jay Warner, asserts that Bragg was born on May 6, 1926 though his Penitentiary records said January 18, 1925. Bragg himself once said it was in 1929 and then told Bill Millar ''I was born right here in Nashville on Herman street
back in 1932''. He told Colin Escott his birth was never registered and that he used details from a brother's birth
certificate. Census date for 1930 lists Bragg as aged four years to his brothers' six and seven years. Johnny's mother had complications with his birth and she died as he was delivered. He told Millar, ''I was born blind and I stayed blind for seven years and they tell me that the doctors used to sit me on top of the
tables and I'd sing to the doctors''. He gained a keen appreciation of sound and his interest in singing dates back to that time. He said: ''The first music I believe I ever tried to sing was a song called blue heaven, you know ''My Blue Heaven'' baby made three and Molly and me and so on.. and there
was another song called 'What you gonna do when the rent man come around back in the Depression days, you know...
The greatest thing that really influenced me to want to do something was the Ink Spots, Bill Kenny... his voice was sweet, kind, you could understand everything he was trying to say''.

Living his early life with relatives, Bragg apparently spent his time alternately doing neighbourly deeds and running and fighting with a local gang. He attended school in north Nashville, just a few blocks from the penitentiary, as far as sixth grade but
he told Warner, ''I didn't get much education. I didn't care anything about it. Fr as I'm concerned, eduction wasn't
nothing, you know, just a thing called Joe''. Instead, music was his thing, as far as anything constructive was.

Education or
not, Johnny Bragg had developed a real interest in composing songs by the time he joined the prison group. He would practice them day and night, memorably singing with a bucket over his head to focus the sound and reduce the voice for others. For some years he stored songs in his head until he was ready to share
them with his fellow singers but by early 1950s he would have them written out properly by other inmates such as black trumpeter George Williams. He also spent time with another maturing songwriter, Robert Riley, and it was Riley who collaborated with him on his signature song, ''Just Walkin'
In The Rain'' was being written in 1953 two events combined to start the improbable sequence of events that unfolded
for the not-yet-named prison singing group.

This now comprised Bragg, Thurman, and Stewart along with another tenor, John Drue, and bass
singer Marcell Sanders. The first event was the election of Frank Clement as Governor of Tennessee, and the other was a visit to the prison by radio producer Joe Calloway and recording engineer and publisher Red Wortham.

Frank Clement was a reforming Democrat who appointed James Edwards as warden of the Penitentiary with an enlightened plan to connect prisoners with their local community, to encourage rehabilitation as much as punishment, and to improve the prison's
image. Clement and Edwards took up their respective jobs in January 1953 and within a few months had invited local
radio producer Joe Calloway of WSIX to come into the penitentiary to make a programmed promoting their vision of prison life. One of the things they stage-managed for Calloway was a performance by Bragg and his group in the dining hall. Calloway was duly impressed and arranged to include the group in broadcasts
from the prison that showcased the talent of prisoners. He then agreed with the warden that the group would travel under guard
to the studio of WSIX in Nashville to give a weekly radio show.

Calloway did something else, too. He contacted a recording engineer and promoter, Red Wortham. According to Wortham: ''I had a little recording studio at Fourth and Union and it was right around the corner from radio WSIX where the disc jockeys were my
friends. A jockey named Joe Calloway stopped by the studio one day in 1953 and wanted me to go to the prison.
He said 'we got a group out there that sings real good and I think you need to go and listen to those boys because they're good'. He came actually two or three times and I didn't go. But the third time I went out there with Joe when he was broadcasting a show by prisoners from the stage of the auditorium they had
out there. I said to them Í like what you do and I'll come out and record you'. So I went in there with a Magnecord tape machine and we made recordings with the idea to get them out on records''.

For all this, the group needed a name and it was now that ''the prisoners'' became The Prisonaires. Johnny Bragg said that he named them although Red Wortham told me: ''They didn't call themselves the Prisonaires then. I was the one that named them the
Prisonaires. They had another name they were using. I can't remember, but it was a name that was already taken.
Someone else had that name so we couldn't use that for records. Joe Calloway, he is the man that is responsible for Johnny Bragg and The Prisonaires because if he hadn't taken me out there nobody would have known about them''.

JANUARY 31, 1953 SATURDAY

New single of Rosco Gordon ''Just In From Texas'' b/w ''I'm In Love'' (RPM 379) released.

JANUARY 31/ FEBRUARY 1, 1953 SATURDAY/SUNDAY

The 1953 North Sea flood (Dutch: Watersnoodramp,
literally "flood disaster") was a major flood caused by a heavy storm that occurred on the night of Saturday, 31 January 1953 and morning of Sunday, 1 February 1953. The floods struck theNetherlands, Belgium, England and Scotland.

A combination of a high spring tide and a severe European windstorm over the North Sea caused a storm tide; the combination of wind, high tide, and low pressure led to a water
level of more than 5.6 metres (18.4 ft) above mean sea level in some locations. The flood and waves overwhelmed sea defences and caused extensive flooding. The Netherlands, a country with 20% of its territory below mean sea level and 50% less than
1 metre (3.3 ft) above sea level and which relies heavily on sea defences, was worst affected, recording 1,836 deaths and widespread property damage. Most of the casualties occurred in the southern province of Zeeland. In England, 307 people were killed
in the counties of Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. Nineteen were killed in Scotland. Twenty-eight people were killed in West Flanders, Belgium.

Another
more than 230 deaths occurred on water craft along Northern European coasts as well as on ships in deeper waters of the North Sea. The ferry MV Princess Victoria was lost at sea in the North Channel east of Belfastwith 133 fatalities, and many
fishing trawlers sank.

Realising that such infrequent events could recur, the Netherlands particularly, and the United Kingdom carried out major studies on strengthening
of coastal defences. The Netherlands developed the Delta Works, an extensive system of dams and storm surge barriers. The UK constructed storm surge barriers on the River Thames below London and on the River Hull where it meets the Humber estuary.
The North Sea flood of 1953 kills 1,835 people in the southwestern Netherlands.

A newscaster on Nashville's WSIX, Joe Calloway, was at the Tennessee State Penitentiary when he heard the Prisonaires and arranged for them
to perform on the station. He brought them to the attention of producer Red Wortham who taped the group and pitched them to Sam Phillips via their mutual partner, Jim Bulleit. Pat Boone was also on WSIX at the time hosting a Saturday morning show called ''Youth
On Parade'' with Joyce Paul.

In a figurative act of revenge for
his future cover versions of rhythm and blues songs, the Prisonaires were taped over Boone, who can be heard between songs. The tape made its way to Sam Phillips and was mistakenly used as the master on some early 1970s reissues when the original
master couldn't be found.

Although not a Sun recording here.
Johnny Bragg's vocal on the released version was a little more orotund, but the recordings were otherwise very close, suggesting that the Prisonaires had put their plentiful rehearsal time to very good use, working and reworking every syllable and nuance.

The first unissued take is one of their earliest, a version of ''Baby Please'' that probably comes from the first tape Red Wortham recorded
to tout around the record companies. The song was re-recorded by Sam Phillips with an added bluesiness provided by the electric guitar and drums of Joe Hill Louis and issued as the A-side of the group's first Sun disc. This version we hear retains
William Stewart's quieter acoustic guitar backing the softly pleading vocal that prevailed when the song was first conceived by its writer, Robert Riley, and realized by the group. The lead singer here is John Drue who may well have been considered
the main vocalist in the group in the days before ''Just Walkin' In The Rain'' became a hit. A different alternative version previously issued by Bear Family has Drue opening with ''Darlin' please''.

''Just Walkin' In The Rain'' was a song Johnny Bragg had written just months earlier with the help of Robert Riley, a more musically organized fellow inmate but not a member of the group. According to Johnny Brag, ''Well, I called myself a singer. I'm not going to say I was a singer. I tried to sing. One day it was raining heavy, and me and Robert Riley was walking to the laundry, and Bob said, 'Johnny, I wonder what the little
girls are doing now'. And I said, 'I don't know what the little girls are doing, but we better hurry and get out of this rain'. And I started singing that song. Now Riley was a smart man, I wasn't too smart myself, just had a little talent, and we put some
more lyrics to it. In fact, we had a lot of lyrics. I couldn't write mine down, I ain't had no education, see? I just had that talent. Ain't that strange?''.

Songwriter Gilbert Becaud has a son, Gaya Becaud, in France. When the boy is six, his father scores a hit as The Everly Brothers recorded ''Let It Be Me''. The
song is also a country success for Glen Campbell and Bobbie Gentry and for Willie Nelson.

FEBRUARY 6, 1953 FRIDAY

Lefty Frizzell recorded ''(Honey, Baby, Hurry) Bring Your Sweet Self Back To Me'' during a late-night session at the Jim Beck Studio in Dallas, Texas.

FEBRUARY 7, 1953 SATURDAY

Marty Robbins debuts on the
Grand Ole Opry, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, performing ''Ain't You Ashamed'' and ''Good Night Cincinnati, Good Mornin' Tennessee''.

FEBRUARY 9, 1953 SUNDAY

Decca released T. Texas Tyler's
''Bumming Around'' and Kitty Well's ''Paying For That Back Street Affair''.

FEBRUARY 10, 1953 MONDAY

A judge in Los Angeles approves the reworking of 14-year-old Jimmy Boyd's contract. The decision allows producer Abner Greshler to receive 50% of the boy's recording
profits through January 23.

FEBRUARY 12, 1953 THURSDAY

Songwriter Taylor Rhodes is born. He plays drums for the Earl Scruggs Revue for two years in the late-1970s before going on to write pop hits for Aerosmith and Celine Dion.

FEBRUARY 13, 1953 FRIDAY

Hank Snow recorded ''Spanish
Fire Ball'' and ''For Now And Always'' at Thomas Productions in Nashville, Tennessee.

FEBRUARY 15, 1953 SUNDAY

Gene Autry joins Bing Crosby and Molly Bee on the Ed Sullivan-hosted CBS variety show ''Toast Of The Town''.

FEBRUARY 17, 1953 TUESDAY

Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper
recorded ''Are You Walking And A-Talking For The Lord'' at the Castle Studio in Nashville. It ranks among country's 500 greatest singles in the Country Music Foundation book ''Heartaches By The Number''.

FEBRUARY 18, 1953 WEDNESDAY

Carl Smith recorded ''Orchids
Mean Goodbye'', ''Do I Liked It?'', ''Trademark'' and ''Just You Wait 'Til I Get You Alone'' during the afternoon at Nashville's Castle Studio.

FEBRUARY 20, 1953 FRIDAY

Columbia released Marty Robbins' ''I Couldn't Keep From Crying''.

FEBRUARY 21, 1953 SATURDAY

Autry Inman recorded ''But That's All Right''.

The late Hank Williams registers a number 1 country
single in Billboard with ''Kaw-Liga''.

FEBRUARY 22, 1953 SUNDAY

A benefit concert in Louisville raises $9,000 for Bill Monroe who broke 19 bones in a January car accident. Among the artists on the bill, Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, Red Foley, Lew Childre, Carl Smith and Mother Maybelle
Carter and The Carter Sisters.

A raw December wind sent an
icy chill through the tall, lean young man who stared longingly at the mandolin in the display window of the music store. Just a few more dollars saved from odd jobs and sacrificed lunches and that fine instrument would be his. He pulled his collar closer about his throat and turned wistfully homeward. The year
was 1950, the place was Memphis, Tennessee and the young man was Lloyd Arnold McCollough. At this point Lloyd had a lifetime ahead of him and he could imagine the possibilities that a mandolin could bring. Twenty years later the pressure of a touring musician had begun to take it’s toll. But,
let’s not go ahead of time, the story of Lloyd Arnold, who became a pioneer of early Memphis music, began many years earlier.

Lloyd
Arnold McCollough, born in Memphis, Tennessee on June 25, 1935, was the youngest child of John and Clemmie McCollough. He suffered from meningitis as a child, but recovered. During
high school he wanted to become a professional baseball player, but was also interested in music, and Hank Williams, Sr. was his idol. He learned to play the mandolin he received for Christmas in 1951 and decided to become a musician.

With
his brother Jimmy (bass), his niece Geneva (vocals), Curley Raney (fiddle) and a friend named Grady (steel guitar), he founded his first band, the Drifting Hillbillies. McCollough
and his group appeared on Saturday Night Jamboree, a barn dance show in Memphis on WHBQ, and soon became members. Backstage he met a young Elvis Presley.

McCollough also appeared on Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour and played at events in Memphis. His brother
Jimmy married and left the group, and was replaced first by Buddy Holly (not the well-known Buddy Holly and then by Bobby Howard).

In
1954, he graduated from high school and married in the summer of that year. The marriage did not last long. In Booneville, Mississippi, he bought a record store and became a business
partner of Charles Bolton. Their new record label released the group's debut single, "Watch That Girl'' b/w ''Oh Darling''. Hayden Thompson and Johnny Burnette recorded their first titles on the same label.

After several unreleased recordings, he published his second single on Meteor Records in January 1956. In the following years McCollough recorded for many different labels, including Republic, Starday, and Memphisk. In 1963, he released a single
under the name of Lloyd Arnold. His last session was in 1971. McCoullough's father John died in 1968, two years later his mother followed him. Failing health and years of fighting meningitis he lost the battle on January 10, 1976.

STUDIO SESSION FOR LLOYD ARNOLD (MCCOLLOUGH)

AT THE MEMPHIS RECORDING SERVICE FOR SUN RECORDS 1953

SUN RECORDING STUDIO

706 UNION AVENUE, MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

SUN SESSION: FEBRUARY 24, 1953 TUESDAY

SESSION HOURS: UNKNOWN

PRODUCER AND RECORDING ENGINEER - SAM PHILLIPS

During 1953 and 1954 Lloyd and his band recorded several demos and acetates at the newly opened Memphis Recording Service, at 706 Union Avenue. During the nineties thirteen of these acetates were relocated by re-searcher Jim Cole, employed by the University
of Memphis.

During those fun filled days, Lloyd and the Drifting Hillbillies had a great time performing at such places as ''The
Old Dominion Barn Dance'', ''The Renfro Valley Barn Dance'', ''Red Foley’s Ozark Jubilee'' and the ''Louisiana Hayride''. In January of 1955 they performed at the ''Hillbilly
Festival'' for WRBL-TV in Columbus, Georgia. In February and March they were in Little Rock, Arkansas at the ''Barnyard Frolic'' and in December they played ''The Big D Jamboree'' in Dallas, Texas. That same year he hosted another weekly radio program, for WBIP in Booneville, Mississippi.

The release of Joe Hill Louis under the name Chicago Sunny Boy would not have fooled Sam Phillips for one minute, even if it did baffle researchers years later. Its release in April would mark the beginning of
the end of Louis' relationship with Phillips, who had worked hard with him during November and December 1952 to come up with a powerful double-header for the planned Sun relaunch. Louis was another artist caught in the middle of the Modern-Chess wars, as Phillips
had sent a coupling to Chess during the previous July, at which point he moved away from his one-man-band format to full-band format.

Modern had at first dug back to earlier recordings, before resorting to recording him in the field for what would be his last release on the label. For his Sun sessions Louis had, like
Walter Horton and so many others taken Little Walter's lead and recorded with heavy amplification on the harmonica.

Joe Hill Louis Meteor session in February 1953 returns to a one-man-band format and is the second focal point of his recordings. It was recorded during a Modern trip and not by Lester Bihari himself as has sometimes
been speculated. On return to the West Coast on March 18, 1953, very anonymous bass and drums were overdubbed to the four sides slated for release. This addition basically only served to dilute the south. The original undubbed recordings are here.

Exceptionally fine are two further instrumentals (originally logged as ''Boogie'' and ''Boogie No. 2'') which eventually came out on the Howlin' Wolf Crown LP as ''Twisting And Turning'' and ''Backslide Boogie'' respectively.
The rock solid ''Twisting And Turning'' has never been on CD and it is a more deliberate and superior take to that original issued as ''On The Floor'' on the rare second Meteor 78. A glance at the discography reveals that the undubbed version of this take
no longer exists while ''She Broke Up My Life'' is the correct title for ''She Got Me Walkin''. This title had been assigned to another take of the same song, which now only exists as a fragment due to tape damage.

''Good Morning Little Angel'' is a pretty weak adaption of Sonny Boy's ''School Girl'' but this Meteor session still finds Joe in absolute top form with wonderful
cohesion between the instruments. It occupies a unique place in his discography as the only full one-man-band session recorded with amplified harp.

09 – "BOOGIE (BACKSLIDE BOOGIE)" - B.M.I. - 3:00

Composer: - Jules Taub-Sam Ling

Publisher: - Copyright Control

Matrix number: - None - Not Originally Issued

Recorded:
- February 24, 1953

Released: - 1962

First appearance: - Crown Records (LP) 33rpm Crown CLP 5240 mono

HOWLIN' WOLF SINGS
THE BLUES

Reissued: 2001 Ace Records (CD) 500/200rpm Ace CDCHD 803-28 mono

JOE HILL LOUIS - BOOGIE IN THE PARK

None of the above session was released in its original form at the time. The session below were issued as by Chicago Sunny Boy. MR 5012 omitted the first 12s and
faded the track earlier. These version will be included on a forthcoming Ace collection of the original Meteor Blues and Rhythm and Blues singles.

''Jack Pot'' is actually Woody Herman's ''At The Woodchopper's Ball'' and Joe's superb performance was indicated
as such on the tape box. Two takes exist with both equally meriting inclusion, but the shorter previously unissued and looser alternate take heard here (see above).

''Western Union Man''/''Jack Pot'' as by Chicago Sonny Boy was a good seller but would have been of unlikely long-term value to Joe's career. The pseudonym, which even fooled researchers for years, suggests that his contract with the Biharis
had by this rime ended.

Joe Hill Louis returned to Sun
a couple of moths later to cut scintillating versions of his two most commercial songs, ''Tiger Man'' and ''Hydramatic Woman'' with a band including Walter Horton on harmonica but no release at the time resulted.

Jimmy and Walter recorded three numbers, including an instrumental. For his part, Sam Phillips had mastered tape delay to create reverb, and the increment of tape delay seems to increase in tandem with the intensity
of Horton's performance. Shimmering blue perfection. Truly a masterpiece. as well as the first known Sun release be to pressed on both 78 and 45rpm. Sam Phillips was high on this release, judging by his check register. two days after this session, he was running
off dubs to send out to disc jockeys. It seems that he hand-delivered a bud to Eddie Teamer at WHHM because he charged back the cigarettes he gave Teamer. On March 2, he mailed out another four dubs in advance of finished copies.

One of the most erroneously-titled performance of all time. Walter Horton demonstrates total control here as he climbs the harp's register to blow a harsh passage as the tune's bridge, whilst Jimmy Dewberry tidies up behind him
and throws in the occasional fill. In places the harmonica sounds more like a sax, belying the cheapness of the harp Walter is playing - but what impress most are the perfect timing and the sheer breadth of his musical ideas. No matter how many times
you hear this one it still possesses the power to take the breath away - and like all true masterpieces, there is a poise and sense of rightness to each and every contributory element. Truly a masterpiece.

Although credited to
"Jimmy & Walter", the latter must have been taking five when this side was cut. In fact, this track serves to refute Sam Phillips' assertion (made to musicologist David Evans) that he never got a good cut out of Jimmy DeBerry. Perhaps Phillips
thought he heard something in a demo or audition session that DeBerry never quite recaptured - but surely the blues comes no pure than this marvelous recording. Without prompting, Marion Keisker remembered these lines thirty years after DeBerry had
sung them: "Woman I love dead and in her grave/woman I hate, I see her everyday". If ever one needed evidence that the blues was indeed folk poetry, they need look no further than this (mind you, its probably worth adding that Big Joe
Williams had used several of the same lyrics years earlier in "Meet Me In The Bottom"). The recording is spare, but DeBerry's performance is masterful: it is a beautifully poised country blues, vocal and guitar meshing perfectly with rudimentary
support from Houston Stokes on drums. Not a note or vocal inflection is wasted.

Name (Or. No. Of Instruments)

Walter Horton - Harmonica

Jimmy
DeBerry - Vocal and Guitar - 1

Houston Stokes - Drums

Horton was fronted one dollar to buy a harmonica and was paid another three dollars for the session; Jimmy DeBerry was given two dollars, Houston Stokes five together with another
seventy-five cents to haul his drums home in a cab.

With
the minimal and often shaky support of DeBerry, Horton played the same theme five times, with mounting intensity. By the fourth chorus, he was playing with such ferocity that his harmonica sounded like a tenor saxophone.

Sam Phillips' virtuosity with tape delay echo was rarely used to better advantage;
he made three instruments sounds as full as an orchestra. Any other instrument would have been redundant. Sam Phillips saw promise in Horton's guitarist, Jimmy DeBerry, who had done some recordings before the War. "Before Long" the flip side
of "Easy", was DeBerry feature. It showcase his laconic delivery and barely proficient playing. Like Jimmy Reed, however, who never rose above bare proficiency, DeBerry...

...had an ear for haunting couplets and an element charm that transcended his technical limitations. Some of this glimmered through on "Before Long": "Woman I love dead
and in her grave, woman I hate, I see her every day".

Before
Long's more immediate forebear, though, was Tony Hollins' 1951 Decca recording of ''I'll Get A Break''. Hollins was a barber in Clarksdale and later in Chicago whose ''Crawlin' King Snake'' was an influential recording from ten years earlier when he also made
''Married Woman Blues'', another song the the ''before long'' refrain. None of this subtle or not-so-subtle plagiarism devalues BeBerry's record. It's spartan, even for 1953, but the performance is masterful. He crafted a beautiful poised country blues, vocal
and guitar meshing perfectly with rudimentary support from Houston Stokes on drums. Not a note or vocal inflection in wasted; no other instrument is required.

Pop singer Juanita Curiel is born. She joins the trio Hot, whose 1977 hit ''Angel In Your Arms'' is covered by Barbara Mandrell for a 1985 country single.

FEBRUARY 27, 1953 FRIDAY

Ernest Tubb and Red Foley recorded ''No Help Wanted #2'' in the afternoon
at the Tulane Hotel's Castle Studio in Nashville, Tennessee.

Jimmy Heap recorded ''Release Me'' in Texas.

MARCH 1953

The singles, Sun 180 ''Easy b/w Before Long'' by Jimmy & Walter and Sun 181 ''Bear Cat'' b/w ''Walkin' In The Rain'' by Rufus Thomas are released at the end of the month..

Once again Sun 180 it featured
Walter Horton, this time as half of a duo billed as Jimmy and Walter and made up of himself and guitarist Jimmy DeBerry, with Houston Stokes helping out sparingly on drums. The A-side ''Easy'' was a harmonica instrumental that in anyone else's hands might
have seemed little more than a harmonic restatement of Ivory Joe Hunter's 1950 blues standard, ''I Almost Lost My Mind''. With Walter's genius for tonal variation, however, it embraced a shimmering new palette, as verse follows lyrical verse, sounding at first,
with its full rounded vibrato-laden tone, as if the harmonica is coming from inside the bottle, then gradually taking on additional force and meaning until, with a mix of reverb, angry squalls, and sheer volume, the lyrical gives way for a moment to a mood
almost of aggression, then subsides once again, though not altogether, to the pure beauty of its original inspiration. There is no bridge, just a compact turnaround at the end of each verse, and Jimmy DeBerry's unamplified guitar could not play more uncomplicated
blues changes throughout, but the effect id riveting, seeking, in Sam's uncompromising terms, to capture no more and no less than unfettered self-expression.

The other side, ''Before Long'', opens with the same unamplified guitar and in some ways offers much the same
affect, except this time there is no Walter Horton, with Jimmy DeBerry's delicate, somewhat wobbly vocal substituting for the harmonica. Once again the presentation could not be simpler, the message could not be more intimate. ''I worked all the summer / And
all the fall / Gonna spend Christmas / In my overalls. But I'll get a break, Somewhere, Before long''. It was Marion Keisker, quoting the lyrics from memory, ''a perfect example of the twelve-bar blues''. But she recognized, too, that its utter simplicity,
its sound of unforced intimacy, was not in any way a matter of chance. It was a product of Sam Phillips trying to make every record as perfect as it could possibly be. Not perfect in the usual conventional terms, perfect on its own terms. What Sam was after,
as he told her over and over, as he told anyone who would listen, was perfection of feeling, not perfection of technique.

Earl Peterson, later to recorded for Sun Records, joins WFYC radio in Alma, Michigan. He also starts the Nugget record label with Mrs. Pearle Lewis (his mother).

MARCH 2, 1953 MONDAY

Bonnie Lou recorded ''Seven
Lonely Days'' in Cincinnati.

MARCH 3, 1953 TUESDAY

Alvyce King, of The King Sisters, is widowed with the death of husband Sydney DeAzevedo. The Kings had a 1946 country hit with a remake of ''Divorse Me C.O.D.''.

During 1953 and 1954 Lloyd and his band recorded several demos and acetates at the newly opened Memphis Recording Service, at 706 Union Avenue. During the nineties thirteen
of these acetates were relocated by re-searcher Jim Cole, employed by the University of Memphis.

During those fun filled days, Lloyd and the Drifting Hillbillies had a great time performing at such places as ''The Old Dominion Barn Dance'', ''The Renfro Valley Barn Dance'', ''Red Foley’s
Ozark Jubilee'' and the ''Louisiana Hayride''. In January of 1955 they performed at the ''Hillbilly Festival'' for WRBL-TV in Columbus, Georgia. In February and March they were in Little Rock, Arkansas at the ''Barnyard Frolic''
and in December they played ''The Big D Jamboree'' in Dallas, Texas. That same year he hosted another weekly radio program, for WBIP in Booneville, Mississippi.

Joe Hill Louis had been the session guitarist on "Bear Cat" and its success naturally him to think up a new angle on the song. He probably saw his new song as a hit for himself, making
two recordings of "Tiger Man" around May 1953, a demo with unknown piano and drums and a more finished version with Albert Williams playing piano and Walter Horton on harmonica along with an unknown drummer. Louis carries the first version on
guitar and sings in a restrained manner. He breaks out much more on the second version his vocal is more to the while the others carry the instrumental lead. Louis second version is here for comparison with the tour de force Rufus Thomas recorded
just a few weeks later.

Joe returned to Sun a couple of months later to cut scintillating versions of his two most commercial songs - ''Tiger Man'' and ''Hydramatic Woman'' with a band including
Walter Horton on harmonica but no release at the time resulted.

A
mystery version of the latter song by Louis with a full rhythm and blues band was eventually released by 4-Star on their Big Town subsidiary in 1954. Clearly taken from an old acetate, it is very likely an earlier version sent by Phillips
to Don Pierce at 4-Star during the time of their earlier dealings. All that would follow during Joe's tragically short life would be two chaotic 1953 sessions held at a radio station with George Lawson's band for Henry Stone's Rockin' label
- followed by an unissued session for Johnny Vincent the next year. Later on, there was a strange record on Vendor (taken from a radio broadcast) and a very rocking 1957 record on House Of Sound, which proved that Joe Hill Louis's talent
was still intact for the talented producer who could capture it - just as Sam Phillips had done.

WILLIE MAE "BIG MAMA" THORNTON - (December 11, 1926-July 25, 1984) was an American rhythm and blues singer and songwriter. She was the
first to record the hit song "Hound Dog" in 1952. The songs was a number 1 on the Billboard Rhythm And Blues Charts for seven weeks. The B-side was "They Call My Big Mama", and the single sold almost two million copies. Three
years later, Elvis Presley recorded his version, based on a version performed by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys. In a similar occurrence, she wrote and recorded "Ball 'N' Chain", which became a hit for her. Janis Joplin later recorded
"Ball and Chain", and was a huge success in the late 1960s.

Willie
Mae Thornton was born in Montgomery, Alabama. Her introduction to music started in the Baptist church. Her father was a minister and her mother was a church singer. She and her six siblings began to sing at a very early age. Thornton's
musical aspirations led her to leave Montgomery in 1941, after her mother's death, when she was just fourteen, and she joined the Georgia-based Hot Harlem Revue. Her seven-year tenure with the Revue gave her valuable singing and stage
experience and enabled her to tour the South.

In 1948, she settled in Houston, Texas, where she hoped
for further her career as a singer. Willie Mae was also a self-taught drummer and harmonica player and frequently played both instruments on stage.

Thornton began her recording career in Houston, singing a contract with Peacock Records in 1951. While working with another Peacock artist, Johnny Otis, she recorded "Hound
Dog", a song that composers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had given her in Los Angeles. The record was produced by Johnny Otis, and went to number one on the rhythm and blues chart. Although the record made her a star, she saw little
of the profits.

She continued to record for Peacock until 1957
and performed with rhythm and blues package tours with Junior Parker and Ester Phillips. In 1954, Thornton was one of two witnesses to the death of blues singer Johnny Ace. Her career began to fade in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She
left Houston and relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she mostly played local blues clubs.

In 1966, Thornton recorded "Big Mama Thornton With The Muddy Waters Blues Band", with Muddy Waters. Thornton's last album was "Jail" (1975) for Vanguard Records. It vividly captures her charm during
a couple of mid-'70s gigs at two northwestern prisons. She became the talented leader of a blues ensemble that features sustained jams from Georgia "Harmonica" Smith, as well as guitarists B. Huston and Steve Wachman, drummer Todd
Nelson, saxophonist Bill Porter, bassist Bruce Sieverson, and pianist J.D. Nicholas.

Thornton performed at the legendary Monterey Jazz Festival in 1966 and 1968, and at the San Francisco Blues Festival in 1979. In 1965 she performed with the American Folk Blues Festival package in Europe.

During her career, she appeared on stage from New York City's famed Apollo Theater
in 1952 to the Kool Newport Jazz Festival in 1980, and she was nominated for the Blues Music Awards six times.

On July 25, 1984, Willie Mae Thornton died in Los Angeles of heart and liver complications, probably brought on by years of alcohol abuse which had reduced the onetime 350-pound "Big Mama" Thornton
to a mere ninety-five pounds. Johnny Otis conducted her funeral services, and she was laid the rest in the famous Inglewood Park Cemetery, along with a number of notable people, including entertainment and sports personalities.

As an influence over the music and musicians which followed her, her importance cannot be
overstated. Her name and legacy will forever remain the very greatest of blues legends. Thornton's mighty voice, take-no-guff attitude, and incendiary stage performances influenced generations of blues and rock singers and carried on the tradition of
tough "blues mamas" like Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, and Ma Rainey.

MARCH 5, 1953 THURSDAY

Singer/songwriter Aaron Baker is born in Texas. Barker writes such George Strait hits as ''Baby Blue'', ''Easy Come, Easy Go'' and ''Love Without End, Amen'', plus Lonestar's ''What About Now'' and Clay Walker's ''You're Beginning
To Get To Me''.

MARCH 6, 1953 FRIDAY

Singer/guitarist Phil Alvin is born in Los Angeles, California. He acts as frontman for
The Blasters, a major influence on the blues, rockabilly and country genre. He also Supports Joe Walsh and Steve Earle on ''Honey Don't'' in the Beverly Hillbillies soundtrack.

MARCH 7, 1953 SATURDAY

Patsy Cline marries Gerald Cline in Frederick, Maryland.

Rock drummer Kenny Aronoff is born. After establishing himself with John Mellencamp, he plays on country hits by Travis Tritt, Willie Nelson and Jake Owen,

MARCH 8, 1953 SUNDAY

Rhythm and blues artist Rufus Thomas recorded ''Bear Cat'' at the Memphis Recording Studio. Producer Sam Phillips, who wrote the song, subsequently gets used for stealing the melody from ''Hound Dog''.

It would be eleven months before Rufus Thomas was back at Phillips' Memphis Recording Service,
and this time the output would be on a hometown record label. Phillips had in fact toyed with his Sun label throughout 1952 and he had tried and failed with the country blues and nightclub saxophone instrumentals. Now he had
a new partner - in Jim Bullet, an experienced record man from Nashville who know how to sell records - and a new style to sell in the form of a novelty rhythm and blues song about a Bear Cat. Phillips figured that the song
was just right for the extrovert gravel voiced Rufus Thomas, (Rufus supported his family working five days a week in a textile mill from 6:30 in the morning until 2:30 in the afternoon) ever since his last session on April 21, 1952. Chess Records had released
three singles on Rufus Thomas from the recordings Sam Phillips had submitted, but none of them had clicked, and Sam was convinced it was simply because he hadn't yet found Rufus the right material.

Rufus Thomas was more of an entertainer along the lines of a Louis Jordan than a straight blues singer, something brought home
to Sam Phillips when he Rufus saw him perform his comedy and dancing routine ''Rufus and Bones, with Robert ''Bones'' Couch as the opening act for the ''Rocket 88'' Saturday/Sunday show at the Handy Theatre on the weekend of 7-8 April in 1951. With
his gruff Louis Armstrong-influenced voice, quick wit, and eye-popping antics, he was the perfect candidate to reply to the harsh accusation Big Mama Thornton had thrown out in her song, this time leveling them a a ''bossy woman'', but Rufus balked at the
idea at first. For one thing, he had never heard the expression Sam had found to give the song both its theme and title. Just what, he asked, was a ''bear cat'' when it came to male-female relations? Sam said he wasn't sure about Memphis, but this was a common
phrase in the part of Alabama where he had grown up. Sam said, ''Rufus, hell, you don't know what a damn bear cat is? That's the meanest goddamn woman in the world''.

Quite a piece of history here. Big Mama Thornton's record "Hound Dog" appeared in stores
in March, 1953, "Rabbit's Foot Minstrel" Rufus Thomas, a star disc jockey at WDIA in Memphis, was in as good a position as anyone to know what a smash it was going to be. Within days he was in the Sun studio recording an answer record. By the
end of the month his "Bear Cat" was in stores. Even Billboard was impressed. "This is the fastest answer yet!" they observed on April 4th. A month later, "Bear Cat" was perched at number 3 on the Rhythm and Blues charts. Sun Records had just scored
its first hit.

Billboard was not joking
when it noted that "Bear Cat" was "the fastest answer- song to hit the market". Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog" was shipped at the beginning of March 1953: "Bear Cat" was cut on March 8th, and was in the stores by the end of the month. It entered
the Rhythm and Blues charts on April 18th and peaked at number 3 on May 2nd. It is not known exactly when Sam Phillips was served with an injunction by Don Robey, but it seems that that appeared quite promptly, too. Gimmickry aside, this is a very
primitive record, driven along by Tuff Green's percussive string bass and Joe Hill Louis' spare electric guitar work. Louis takes an extended solo, after which Rufus manages to elbow his way back in.

To his credit Louis does not run short of ideas, although many were borrowed directly from Pete Lewis'
the guitarist on Big Mama's original. The reality is that gimmickry really can't be wholly set aside, and as such this disc hasn't weathered as well as many of Phillips' commercially less-successful productions from this same period. Thirty years
later, Sam's only comment was "I should have known better. The melody was exactly the same as their, but we claimed the credit for writing the damn thing*".

Rufus Thomas does a creditable job of chanting on his own minor key blues, whilst Joe Hill Louis plays aggressively in the now-famous over amplified and distorted style perfected at 706 Union. Louis is supported by
an under-recorded acoustic guitar - possibly played by bassist Tuff Green - and a clomping piano solo handled by Rufus Thomas himself. The song only makes a brief two-bar foray into a major key.

As good as "Walking" was in its way, it was the other side that Sam Phillips wanted to get the market. It is registered in his logbooks that he paid the three musicians fifteen dollars each and sent the master
disc to Shaw for manufacturing the very same day they were recorded.

Name (Or. No. Of Instruments)

Rufus Thomas - Vocal and Piano

In Sam Phillips' check register against ''Talent 'Bear Cat' session'' it shows Albert Williams, piano, suggesting Williams was paid for playing on ''Walkin' In The Rain'' even though Thomas has said he played piano.

Joe Hill Louis contributes some stinging guitar work

especially during his extended 36-bar solo

Houston Stokes - Drums

Tuff Green - Guitar
- 1 and Acoustic Bass soon to be known as 'slap'.

It would have been in character for Rufus to have the idea to parody the lyric on his radio show and to invent his own fearsome big cat to rival Big Mama's dog, and indeed people have spoken about hearing him do that on the radio.
But in fact it was someone else who had the idea and who wrote the song. Rufus called, "No, I didn't write that song. Someone else wrote that". He wouldn't say who it was but the discussion was in the context
of his relationship with Sam Phillips.

The composition was registered under Sam Phillips' name and Sam did talk in later years about working up songs with
Rufus, though he never made much claim to have written "Bear Cat" outright. Maybe he did, or his wife Becky who helped him with the song in the early 1950s did, or perhaps they took the idea from someone else?

Either
was, Sam was keen that Sun should record the song immediately, and that to increase the fun it would be made clear on the record label that this was the "answer to 'Hound Dog'" and that the singer going head to head with the Big Mama was Rufus "Hound
Dog" Thomas Jr.

The elemental twelve-bar blues "Hound Dog" has been the subject of an inordinate number of lawsuits since Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller copyrighted it in early 1953. It was written for Big Mama Thornton (who also
claimed to have written it while in the company of her favourite relative, Old Grandad). But back in March 1953 Elvis Presley was sitting on the side of his bed trying to learn the song, while Sam Phillips was sitting in the studio rewriting it as
"Bear Cat". On this March 8, 1953, only a few weeks after Thornton's version had been released, Sam Phillips called local disc jockey Rufus Thomas into the studio to cut the song. In entered the national Rhythm
and Blues charts on April 18, 1953, only two weeks after Thornton's original version, sparking Billboard to call it "the fastest answer song to hit the market". It eventually climbed all the way to number 3 on the Rhythm and Blues charts, becoming
Sun Records' first hit.

A lawsuit from Don Robey at Peacock Records? Lion Music, correctly charging copyright infringement, followed in short order. Sam Phillips didn't have a leg to stand on when the case came to trial in July 1953, and he was forced to surrender two cents a song to Lion Music along with court costs. "I should have known better", Phillips later
remarked to Robert Palmer. "The melody was exactly the same as theirs". "For a black person", Rufus Thomas told Hugh Merrill, "when Sam Phillips heard Elvis Presley and those people, it was all over".

Lost in the shuffle, was an unspectacular but effective on the flip side. Joe Hill Louis again plays aggressively on the minor key blues "Walking In The Rain" suggests that under ideal conditions. Later the same month, Sun changed
the song and the artist, added a "Just" to the title and tried again.

The answer to hit records are coming along faster than ever. This week a new diskette came out with an answer
to Peacock's smash waxing of "Hound Dog" with thrush Willie Mae Thornton. "Hound Dog" was released only about three weeks ago and has turned out to be one of the fast-breaking hits in recent years.

It has already popped into The Billboard best-selling rhythm and blues charts. The answer to
"Hound Dog" comes from Sun Records, Memphis, Tenn., diskette, a wild thing called "Bear Cat" sung by warbler Rufus Thomas Jr. It used to be that the answer to hits usually waited until the hit had started on the downward trail,
but today the answers are ready a few days after records start moving upwards.

This has led some to remark that the diskettes soon may be bringing out the answers before the original records are released.

MARCH 1953

It is clear that SUN 181 was a serious rush-release. Within two weeks, Billboard was able to report: "The so-called answer record crazy is still going strong in the rhythm and blues field. This week a new
diskette came out with an answer to Peacock's smash waxing of "Hound Dog" with thrush Willie Mae Thornton. "Hound Dog" was released only about three weeks ago and has turned out to be one of the fastest breaking hits in recent
years. It has already popped into the best selling Rhythm And Blues Charts.

The answer to "Hound Dog" comes from Sun Records, Memphis, Tenn, diskery, a wild thing called "Bear Cat" sung by Rufus Thomas Jr. It used to be that the answer to hits usually
waited until the hit had started on the downward trail, but today the answers are ready a few days after records start moving upwards. This has led some to remark that he diskeries soon may be bringing out the answer before
the originals are even released.

The route that brought Hunt from Anniston, Alabama to Phillips' door is unclear. The session were held in March 1952, just as Phillips was readying the first Sun releases. Hunt's record
was held back for over a year, which didn't really matter because it was already twenty years out-of-date.

This performance is even gloomier than the plug side, as Hunt reflects on his baby whilst locked up in a cell. The vocal drips with
feeling, making it hard to believe that this was recorded at 706 Union and not some Southern Penitentiary! The similarity to Lightnin' Hopkins is almost uncanny: the little flash of falsetto at the end of the line, the sour spoken asides, the interplay
between vocal and guitar. According to researcher Steve LaVere, Hunt actually served time in one of Memphis' jails, but that was later. In 1953, his address was noted as Anniston, Alabama, and he was to be contacted via Reverend Noble Ulynn. Hunt was probably
recorded in March 1953 and was back in Memphis in August to collect a nine dollar loan from Phillips. As far as we know, he never recorded again.

Lightnin' Hopkins was clearly Hunt's model right down to the pinched vocal, spoken asides and signature four-note closing lick. It was an almost eerie recreation of Hopkins' sound.
From sixty years' distance, it's hard if not impossible to penetrate the logic behind what got released or remained unreleased on Sun.

Lightnin' himself was becoming a tough sell by 1953, so Phillips certainly wasn't jumping on a bandwagon as he was with ''Bear Cat''. Perhaps he simply liked Hunt's record, Perhaps a distributor
around Hunt's home town of Anniston, Alabama guaranteed a sufficiently big order to justify a small run, Perhaps... we'll never know.

Hunt laments the loss of his baby via public transport. There is some humor when he invokes the familiar 'Greyhound bus' - 'lowdown
dog' analogy. For those who enjoy cross genre comparisons, consider country singer Frankie Miller's Starday recording "Mean Old Greyhound Bus" (Bear Family BFX 15128): Same sentiments, but yen years and a universe apart in style.

Returning to the country blues, Sam Phillips recorded the little-known D.A. Hunt from
Mumford, Alabama on two titles reminiscent of Lightnin' Hopkins among others. The route that brought Hunt from Anniston, Alabama to Sam Phillips' door is unclear. The very guitar and vocal performance is nevertheless one of the most memorable
on Sun although little more was heard from Hunt prior to his death some ten years later. Nonetheless this is excellent, standard Texas blues fare, and was well Worth putting out.

Name (Or. No. Of Instruments)

Daniel Augusta Hunt - Vocal and Guitar

Note: A Sun Records contract was issued to D.A. Hunt this day, suggesting that the session was held this day.

Blues collector and longtime rare records dealer John Tefteller won a recent eBay auction which
featured a previously unknown and potentially one of a kind blues 45 rpm record produced by the Sun label back in 1953. ''I think I stole it'', said Tefteller of the record when
the auction ended with his winning bid of $10,323.00. The record, ''Lonesome Old Jail'' and ''Greyhound Blues'', features an outstanding old style acoustic blues performance
by Alabama blues singer D. A. Hunt. It was Hunt's first and only record and sold very, very few copies when first released by Sam Phillips' now legendary Sun
records label of Memphis, Tennessee.

''This record was not previously known to exist on 45 rpm and even the 78 rpm version is one
of the rarest and most expensive on the Sun label with several documented sales in excess of $10,000.00'', explained Tefteller.

'' To find a
45 is a discovery of monumental importance to the record collecting world and I just had to have it''.

Of course, the latest addition to Tefteller’s blues collection, already referred to by many as the best in the world, means that all the history books, price guides and discographies have to be amended to now state unequivocally, that yes, there is indeed an
original 45 rpm pressing of SUN 183.

Tefteller goes on to explain that when the British record researchers first came to America in the late 1950s, they went to Sun and, with assistance from Sam Phillips, documented everything. 78 rpm stampers were found for SUN 183, but NOT 45 rpm stampers and Phillips told the researchers that no 45’s were made.

'This discovery proves otherwise'', says Tefteller, who speculates that they probably pressed a few hundred and that was it. ''Sam must have just forgotten that he made a small amount of 45s and, significantly, this is not a promotional copy, which means
that they made some promos as well as regular copies for the stores''.

The copy of SUN 183 that Tefteller won on eBay from
Minnesota seller Tim Schloe is not in the best of condition. ''I would grade it at VG-which in the world of record collecting means
it is pretty well used and abused'', Tefteller states. ''There is some damage to the labels as well, but the record does indeed play all the way through and is not totally unpleasant to look at. But all that doesn’t really matter because it is so impossibly rare. No one, myself included, ever dreamed that
this existed on 45. It is mind-boggling that since 1953 only one of these has ever surfaced and to surface in 2009 is unbelievable!''. Schloe says he got the record ''as part of a large collection of used 45s that I bought from the estate of a Dallas, Texas collector who had left them to his brother''. Schloe
knew the record was rare when he found it in the rubble of thousands of old 45s but had ''no idea'' it would bring over
$10,000.00. Tefteller is certain that the Texas collector could not have known it was so rare either or he would have told someone he had it or sold it while he was alive.

According to Tefteller, the world of Sun record collecting has just been turned on its head. ''Guys who thought they had them all are now scrambling to find another legitimate copy. This will prove to be quite a challenge, however as no other copy has surfaced
in over 50 years. There are hundreds of bootleg copies of this title out there on 45 rpm but so far, I now have
the only legitimate one'', boasts Tefteller. ''I’ve got it, and I have no plans to sell it. After all, I can’t say I have the top collection of blues records in the world
if I let this one go''.

While some people may not understand why a collector would pay over $10,000.00 for a beat up old 45 rpm record when you can easily hear both sides of this one in top sound on a reissue CD or a 99 cent Internet download, Tefteller has a ready answer:
''You can go to the Louvre and buys 99 cent postcard of the Mona Lisa too, but there is nothing that beats the
history and importance of actually owning the original!''.

Tefteller, 50, lives in Grants Pass, Oregon and has been buying, selling and collecting rare phonograph records for 35 years. He also produces a yearly blues calendar and has
a series of reissue CDs on the market of extremely rare blues performances from the 1920s. His personal collection contains thousands of original blues 78 rpm records including dozens of one-of-a-kind records by blues singers.
Tefteller also maintains the world's most extensive collection of original blues advertising art and photographs.

MARCH 13, 1953 FRIDAY

Rufus Thomas signed a contract with Sun Records. He
was paid on five occasions between March 23 and June 27 in advance royalties, totaling 275 dollars. He received three advance checks August 1953 and February 1954, some 450 dollars, but after that the contract, and the record of payment, runs out.

MARCH 15, 1953 SUNDAY

Kitty Wells recorded ''Whose Shoulder Will You Cry On'' at Nashville's Castle Studio.

MARCH 17, 1953
TUESDAY

At a trial in Houston, Billie Jean Williams blames the death of her husband, Hank Williams, on narcotics prescribed by the defendant, Toby Marshall, a self-described alcohol therapist'' she
calls a ''quack''.

Pop singer Margaret Whiting and piano player Joe ''Fingers'' Carr are officially separated. They each enjoyed country hits during their three-year marriage.

MARCH 19, 1953 THURSDAY

Tennessee Ernie Ford recorded ''Hey, Mr. Cotton Picker''.

Tex Ritter performs the theme to ''High Noon'' on the
Academy Awards in Los Angeles. The song, ''Do Not Forsake Me'', becomes the first country title to win the Oscar for Best Original Song.

The Carlisles make their Grand Ole Opry debut, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee.

Western-swing singer/guitarist Chris O'Connell is born in Williamsport, Maryland. She's a member of Asleep At The Wheel when the group scores
its lone country hit, 1975's ''The Letter That Johnny Walker Read''.

Mab Anderson, the second wife of playwright Maxwell Anderson, dies. He authored ''September Song'', which Willie Nelson will feature on
his album ''Stardust''.

''A NEW INDIE RHYTHM AND BLUES label was launched here (in Memphis)'', cash Box announced in its March 1953, issue, echoing the PR release
that Sam Phillips had written and Marion Keisker polished and sent out. It cited Sam's work with ''such outstanding artists as Jackie Brenston, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Joe Hill Louis, Rosco Gordon, and Willie Nix'' - a stellar roster, to be sure, but more
striking, if less readily convincing to the everyday businessman, was his unwavering commitment ''to give every opportunity to untried artists to prove their talents whether they play a broom stick or the finest jazz sax in the world''.

MARCH 23, 1953 MONDAY

Decca released Red Foley and Ernest Tubb's ''No Help Wanted #2''.

MARCH 24, 1953 TUESDAY

Leo Fender receives a patent for his Precision Bass, signaling the official beginning of the electric bass guitar.

MARCH 25, 1953 WEDNESDAY

''On
Top Of Old Smokey'' debuts in movie theaters, with Gene Autry and Smiley Burnette. In the picture, Autry protects a Texas land owner from poachers.

Webb Pierce recorded ''It's Been So Long'', ''Don't Throw Your Life Away'' and ''There Stands The Glass'' at Nashville's Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel.

MARCH 26, 1953 THURDAY

Michael Bonagura, of Baillie & The Boys, is born in Newark, New Jersey. His wife, Kathie Baillie, sings lead for the harmonic act, which earns seven Top 10 hits in the late-1980s, including ''Oh Heart'', ''Long Shot'' and ''(I Wish I
Had A) Heart Of Stone''.

It wasn't long before Rufus Thomas's "Bear Cat" became a test case. In Billboard was reported song publishers were seeking legal action:
"In an effort to combat what has become a rampant practice by small labels - the rushing out of answers which are similar in melody and/or theme to ditties which have become smash hits - many pubbers are now retaining attomeys. Common practice, of course, is to regard the answer as an original.
Currently publishers are putting up a fight to protect their originals from unauthorized or infringing answers".
Don Robey of Peacock Records was ever the pragmatist, though, and told Billboard he had notified the Harry Fox publishing agency "to issue Sun a license on "Bear Cat" in order that Robey might collect a royalty".

MARCH 31, 1953 TUESDAY

Guitarist Greg Martin is born in Louisville, Kentucky. He joins The Kentucky Head Hunters, who win a Grammy award and nail down two Vocal Group of the Year honors from the Country Music Association.

Numerous radio stations across the country observe Hank Williams Day, paying homage to the legendary singer who died three months earlier.

Eddy Arnold recorded ''How's The World Treating You'', ''Free Home Demonstration'' and ''Mama, Come
Get You Baby Boy'' at the RCA Studios in New York City.

Early
in 1953, probably March or April, Doctor Ross made another session for Sam Phillips but Phillips did not log the details and again nothing was issued. There appear to have been five or six songs recorded then, with Ross playing guitar and harmonica accompanied
just by Reuben Martin on washboard. ''My Be Bop Gal'' was little more than a catchy title sung over and over against an incessant Ross-style rhythm. ''Texas Hop'' was a title taken from Pee Wee Crayton's 1948 hit of the same name but is not the
same song. It doesn't bring us anything new but it's a great example of Ross's energetic and engaging style. ''Deep Down In The Ground'', noted on the tape box as ''Terra Mae'' and first issued as ''Taylor Mae'', is actually a slower tempo version of John
Lee Sonny Boy Williamson's 1938 record which recycled his much-imitated ''Good Morning, School Girl'' riff. ''Turkey Bakin' Woman'' (previously logged and issued as ''Turkey Leg Woman'') is a highly spirited boogie based on Yank Rachell's Bluebird disc of
''Biscuit Baking Woman'' from 1941. Ross starts off singing about how his gal bakes her biscuits so nice but then quickly switches to extolling her turkey bakin' process.

* 01(1) - "DEEP DOWN IN THE GROUND

(TAILOR MAE) (TERRA MAE)" - B.M.I. - 2:43

Composer: - Sonny Boy Williamson

Publisher: - Copyright Control

Matrix number: - None - Take 1 - Not Originally Issued

Recorded: - Probably March/April 1953

Released: - 1986

First appearance: - Charly Records (LP) 33rpm Sunbox 105 mono

SUN RECORDS - THE BLUES YEARS 1950 - 1956

Reissued: - 1996 Charly Records (CD) 500/200rpm CDSUNBOX
7-6-16 mono

SUN RECORDS - THE BLUES YEARS 1950 - 1958

* 01(2) - "DEEP DOWN IN THE GROUND

(TAILOR MAE) (TERRA MAE)" - B.M.I. - 2:38

Composer: - Sonny Boy Williams

Publisher: - Copyright Control

Matrix number: - None - Take 2 - Not Originally Issued

Recorded: - Probably March/April
1953

Released: - 1992

First appearance: - Charly Records (CD) 500/200rpm
SUN 37 mono

BACK COUNTRY BOOGIE

Reissued:
- 2013 JSP Records (CD) 500/200rpm JSP4239-2-6 mono

DOCTOR ROSS - THE MEMPHIS CUTS 1953 - 1956

Researchers are occasionally prone to effect a curious selectivity when it comes to decihering the labels on old tape boxes. Whilst "Housten Boise" is silently amended
to "Houston Boines", this title - clearly identified on its as "Tailor Mae" - was identified on the original Sun Blues Box as the incomprehensible "Terra Mae". It is in fact a word-for-word recreation of the opening verses from John Lee "Sonny Boy"
Williamson's record "Deep Down In The Ground", recorded for Bluebird in June 1938. In a 1965 interview, Doctor Ross even referred to this recording by Williamson's title. Williamson took this version of the song from Sleepy John Estes, and Ross repeats
Sonny Boy's mishearing of Estes' line, "That woman is tailor made, she ain't no hand-me-down".

02(1) - "TEXAS HOP" - B.M.I. - 2:42

Composer: - Isaiah Ross

Publisher: - Hi-Lo Music Incorporated

Matrix number: - None - Take 1 - Not Originally Issued

Recorded: - Probably March/April 1953

Released: - 1977

First appearance: - Charly Records (LP) 33rpm CR 30127-B-5 mono

SUN - THE ROOTS OF ROCK - VOLUME
12 - UNION AVENUE BREAKDOWN

Reissued: - 1996 Charly Records (CD) 500/200rpm CDSUNBOX 7-6-18 mono

SUN RECORDS - THE BLUES YEARS 1950 - 1958

This
was one of Doctor Ross' generic boogie workouts that all seemed to follow a roughly equivalent course. There is little to choose between the two takes he recorded of this piece - the significant difference being that he plays some three choruses
of harmonica before chanting the title, whereas on the second take, plagued by interference from the guitar's amplifier, he chants the title after just one.

The Doctor took this title from Pee Wee Crayton's 1948 hit of the same name, but the two songs otherwise had nothing in common. After Ross's Chess single did no business, Sam Phillips
decided to persevere with him, recording this very soon after relaunching Sun Records. The nest session, six or seven months later, would yield Ross's first Sun single.

''1953 Jump'' is another boogie breakdown where Ross attempts to get a dance craze started and provides some interesting autobiographical
interjections about being the eleventh child, and ''that's supposed to be lucky, man''. Although Ross hadn't managed to nail anything sufficiently for Phillips to want to issue it at the turn of 1953, Sam did recognise that there was something in Ross that
could be captured. Surely one of his boogies would come out right, so Phillips decided to persevere with him. The next session, some six months later, would yield Ross's first Sun single.

Billboard
gave both sides of Doctor Ross single good reviews in January, 1954, calling them "two good juke box sides". Its true that juke joints and jukeboxes no longer dot the rural south, but the music on SUN 193 is not dated. Sam Phillips would be proud.
The fundamental honestly of this music has rendered it as close to 'timeless' as one might imagine.

The blues releases on Sun tapered off during 1954. There were two singles (and reels and reels of unissued cuts) from the eccentric Doctor Ross, who epitomized all that Sam Phillips loved about the blues. His approach was
rhythmic, propulsive, and countrified. Ross had worked as a one-man band, but Sam Phillips usually brought in some backup musicians when he recorded at Sun. By this time Sam Phillips had perfected his use of slapback echo and used it to give a dept
and resonance to the primitive drive of Rose's music; yet even a superficial comparison of that music with the rhythm and blues hits of 1953 and 1954 shows how anachronistic Ross had become - a fact Ross may have recognized before Phillips.

Don Robey's injunction against Sun Records also set some kind of speed record. What our gang lost in royalties, they gained in wisdom. The letter reads:

Dear sirs,

I have been advised by Mr. Harry
Fox, Agent and Trustee for Lion Publishing Company of Houston, Texas, that license were issued to you authorizing the use of our composition "Hound Dog", your identical copy, being "Bear Cat", but to date, the licence have not been returned.

Please be advised that first, you
should have contacted the owner prior to the release of the record, as release of the composition leaves you liable for 5 cents to 8 cents per record royalty for the intrusion upon the rights of others.

I advised Mr. Harry Fox to license you for the statutory
2 cents per record royalty, allowing you to continue with pressing the record, the same as all of the Companies who were properly licensed prior to the release of their own versions of our composition.

This is to also inform that unless contracts are signed and in the office of Mr. Harris Fox by Wednesday, April 8th, 1953, I will be forced to take immediate steps with Court Actions, plus apply charges for
full 5 cents to 8 cents per record royalty.

Both Billboard and Cash Box questioned how such quick release was arranged
on our material, so is everyone else questioning how the record was released so soon.

I, do hope that this will not cause
any unfriendly relations, but, please remember, I have to pay, when I intrude upon the rights of others, and certainly must protect my own rights.

Very truly yours

LION PUBLISHING COMPANY

Don
D. Robey

DDR:J

APRIL 1953

"Bear Cat" enters the Rhythm and Blues charts, giving Sun its first national hit and it will reach at number 3 in an 8-week chart run.

Billboard reported that Stan Lewis of Stan's Record Shop in Shreveport, Louisiana was the focus of much attention by independent labels, whose bosses were queueing up to pitch him
their goodies. These included, "Jim Bullet of the new Sun label, who arrived to chase Willie Mae Thornton's "Hound Dog" with his punchy new answer "Bear Cat" by Rufus Thomas", Bullet had been hard on the case, achieving some seriously
good publicity for the new label and for "Bear Cat" even before the disc hit the stores. "Bear Cat" was the Billboard Buy o' the Week on April 11: "The answer to "Hound Dog" broke loose this week with fury. Hit a number of
territorial charts and also is registering strongly in Chicago and around Nashville". It reached the national rhythm and blues charts on April 18, 1953, stayed for eight weeks in the top ten and peaked at number three.

APRIL 2, 1953 THURSDAY

Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow arrive back in Nashville after a trip to Korea to entertain American troops in the war. During the
trip, Tubb discovered the North Koreans are using a re-worded version of his song, ''Soldier's Last Letter'', as propaganda.

APRIL 3, 1953 FRIDAY

TV
Guide is introduced nationally with Lucille Ball's baby on the cover. The weekly magazine is mentioned in the lyrics of Steve Wariner's ''What I Didn't Do''.

APRIL 4, 1953 SATURDAY

Don Robey's injunction against Sun Records' "Bear Cat".

Meantime Sam Phillips was still handling the fallout of his success. Don Robey's Lion Musical Publishing Company had used Sun for infringing the copyright on "Hound Dog" and the U.S. District Court had ruled that Sun
had indeed perpetrated an infringement. B.M.I. denied Sun clearance on the disc until Sun agreed to pay two cents per record on all discs sold to Lion Music.

The nature of the independent record business was such that by July, Lion itself was in court defending the contention of Syd
Nathan of King Records in Cincinnati that he had an interest in the song "Hound Dog" and should have a fifty per cent share of its success.

APRIL 1953

During the early years, the Sun label was distributed by Nashville record man
Jim Bulleit and several deals were made between Sam Phillips and Jim Bulleit's Delta and J-B labels. Dusty Brooks'
band apparently recorded these titles in the mod-west and sold them to Bulleit, who in turn leased them to Sun. Certainly the creamy jazz club sound and Juanita Brown's Billie Holiday-influenced vocals were not the sort of music that has become associated with Sam Phillips' studio, "Tears And Wine" features
a duet between Brown and Joe Alexander.

Actually, Brooks was no stranger to the entertainment business. He had previously recorded and enjoyed some limited success on the west coast, where he had also won some fame as an actor in black films. The Vegas lounge act sound of "Heaven Or Fire", or the torchy crooning of "Tears And Wine" were in no way out of character for Brooks. Rather, it is collectors who have trouble reconciling this form
of black music with what know and love most about Sun Records.

"Elvis Prestley, guitarist", as he was mistakenly listed in the program, was 16th on a bill of 22 acts
in the Annual Minstrel Show put on by Humes High School to raise money for various school projects. On the 8:00 p.m. revue he reportedly sang "Cold Icy Fingers", which appears to have been the same song remembered by Ms. Elsie Marmann. Due to the enthusiastic response following his performance, Elvis was allowed the
program's only encore and he sang "Til I Waltz Again With You". There were an estimated 1500 students, faculty and parents
in attendance that night.

"I wasn't popular in school, I wasn't dating anybody there. I failed music - only thing I ever failed. And then they entered me in this talent show, and I came out and
did my "Till I Waltz Again With You" by Teresa Brewer, and when I came on stage I heard people kind of rumbling
and whispering and so forth, 'cause nobody knew I even sang. It was amazing how popular I became after that. Then I went on through high school and I graduated", recalled Elvis Presley.

Singer/songwriter Hal Ketchum is born in Greenwich, New York. He joins the Grand Ole Opry in 1994 on the back of suck melodic singles as ''Small Town Saturday Night'', ''Past The Point Of Rescue'' and ''Sure Love''.

Lillie Mae Glover was a Memphis-based classic blues songstress in the style of Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey, the woman from whom she took her stage name. This recordings is a fascinating amalgam of Handy
Park blues from Pat Hare and Houston Stokes on guitar and drums, and schooled musicianship from Onzie Horne on vibes and Tuff Green on bass. Onzie Horne was an arranger and an educator who tutored Phineas Newborn and Charles Lloyd. Horne hosted a
talk show on WDIA. At one time or another, he was the musical director at the Beale Street theatres where Glover plied her trade, and, for a time, worked with Duke Ellington's manager, Billy Strayhorn. One of his last arrangement was Isaac Hayes' ''Theme From
Shaft''. Horne died in 1963, aged 49.

"You got to sing the blues with your soul. It looks like you hurt in the deep-down part of your heart. You really hurt when you sing the blues. Blues can make you cry. I was singing at a little old club and I'd just sit down and
sing, just sing, I'd sing the blues. I remember times I singed the blues, I just cried, just deliberate cried. And I told the people I didn't know what was wrong with me, but it just got me. And my boss man used to tell me, 'Go on and get it out
of you, old lady, just help yourself".

STUDIO SESSION FOR LILLIE MAE GLOVER MARAINEY

AT THE MEMPHIS RECORDING SERVICE FOR SUN RECORDS
1953

SUN RECORDING STUDIO

706 UNION AVENUE, MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

SUN SESSION: SUNDAY APRIL 19, 1953

SESSION HOURS: UNKNOWN

PRODUCER AND RECORDING ENGINEER - SAM C. PHILLIPS

There was never enough money to live on from either of Mama's career, and so almost always she had an outside job. She worked as a cook, as a cleanup woman for a trucking
line, as a stacker for a fence company, and at a lumber company where "my boss said I was the best man he had there".

The truth is, Big Memphis Marainey's lone Sun single is more interesting to write about than listen. It is best seen as a failed experiment; one of the few hybrids attempted at 706
Union Avenue that went wrong.

Lillie Mae Glover's approach to music is clearly rooted in the classic blues shouting tradition of her namesake, Ma Rainey. On these recordings she was paired with Memphis jazz vibist Onzie Horne and blues guitar King, Pate Hare. Onzie Horne had paid the rent by transcribing music for Sam Phillips' publishing companies. When he was sober, Hare worked the local blues scene and brought to it the same barely controlled rage that appeared in other areas
of his personal life.

At its best, the fury and distortion of Hare's guitar work truly defined a genre within
the blues. On these sides, he plays competently, but without the passion of his best work.

On "Call Me Anything, But Call Me", there is an uneasy alliance of styles, as Hare's bluesy guitar fills clash pointlessly with Horne's jazzy supper
club stylings. Though it all, and seemingly oblivious to the chaos, Lillie Mae belts out her message. Lillian Mae Glover sings in a style which has its origins in a musical era entirely different to virtually everything
else on the recordings, her full-throated vocal delivery being derived from Vaudeville and classic blues - and the Lady herself obviously considers herself an heir to this tradition, by virtue of her adopted pseudonym. On this session she was paired
with Onzie Horne, the late Memphis musician who originally worked for Sam Phillips transcribing songs for copyright purposes (Horne would work with Isaac Hayes in a later era). This track is a fascinating experiment which frankly, does not work,
presenting a curious clash of styles - most notably with Pat Hare's decidedly blues guitar battling out for pole position with Onzie Horne's irksome vibes.

A few weeks after ''Call Me Anything, But Call Me'' was recorded, one of its writer, Milton ''Mitt'' Addington, pitched another song, ''Burned Fingers'',
to western star Wade Ray, who did fairly well with it. One year or so later, Sam Phillips asked him to write songs for Elvis Presley, but he demurred. In 1964, he wrote a by-god hit, ''Laurie (Strange Things Happen In This World)'', during the short-lived
craze for death discs. Performed by another Sun alumnus, Dickey Lee, it was published by yet another, Jack Clement. Around the same time, Lee and Addington combined to write ''Memphis Beat'' for Jerry Lee Lewis. Addington, who made his career as a psychologist,
died in 1979, aged 55.

"Everybody say my voice still strong, and when
I get a band, I can swing. My words get tied up a little bit on account of my teeth, and I can't stand those. I do get hoarse. I are easy to get hoarse quickly. But my voice is not trembly like some of the old singers. My voice ought to be wore out
by now as much as I have hollered - screamed and hollered all night long. I sing the blues for myself. Sometimes they do me some good. It helps you to sing the blues when you're feeling blue".

This is a considerable improvement on its A-side, being a standard jump blues complete with stops in the verse, although performed with none of the usual instrumentation. Here,
Ma Clover's husky vocal is backed only by a trio - fronted by the ubiquitous Hare, who sounds a little less distorted than usual. On balance, this disc is a real oddity: it seems to have been aimed squarely at the black habitues of the local nightclub
scene, and Sam Phillips probably had little ambition of selling it outside Memphis - hence its phenomenal scarcity value (at the time the original Sun Blues Box was being compiled, Ms Glover commented that she was unable to get a copy).

The
song had been composed by Milton "Mitt" Addington, a consulting psychologist who also wrote Sonny Burgess' "Restless", and amateur songwriter, together with Marion Keisker, who typed it out at her desk in the front office at 706 Union.

Almost until her death in April 1985, Lillie Mae Glover was still performing without a marked diminution of exuberance. Records never
really mattered to her.

Pop songwriter Peter DeRose dies in New York. He authored Ted Lewis' 1933 hit ''Have You Ever Been Lonely (Have You Ever Been Blues)'', which is re-configured as a 1981 country duet for
two artists after their deaths: Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline

APRIL 24, 1953 FRIDAY

MGM released the Hank Williams single ''Take These Chains From My Heart''.

END APRIL 1953

Everything seemed to be clicking for Sam Phillips. The one exception was the partnership with Jim Bulleit. For one thing, Jim was getting more and more jumpy. The
nervousness that had first manifested itself with the ''Bear Cat'' lawsuit showed no sign of abating, and, perhaps not coincidentally, he seemed to be increasingly desperate for money. From Sam's point of view, Jim's principal failing was that he always took
the short-term view, whether with respect to people or finances. His approach to marketing, for example, amounted to little more than throwing as much product out there as you could, then seeing what stuck. Which might make sense if your primary commitment
was to churning up activity for your distribution business. But it was the exact opposite of Sam's commitment, what he was firmly convinced was the only course you could take if you truly believed in what you were doing, to put everything you had behind every
record you released and not give up until the market proved you wrong. Sam Phillips allowed himself to be thrown off course one time when he put out a ''cocktail-hour'' record by Dusty Brooks and His Tones that Jim Bulleit had picked up somewhere or other,
but he was not going to do it again. And he was tired of getting letters and phone calls every other day pleading for new releases in the most dire and doom-filled terms.

Juanita Brown appeared as one of two female vocalists with pianist/bandleader
Dusty Brooks. Brooks and his music catered to sophisticated west coast night club audiences, a segment of the market that is rarely associated with Sun Records. Although "Heaven Or Fire" was released by Sam Phillips (Sun 182) in 1953, it most certainly
was not recorded by him. The sides were probably cut in Los Angeles and leased to Jim Bulleit, Phillips' partner in the fledgling Sun label at the time.

SUN 182 remains one of the most obscure and, ultimately, one of the most disliked records ever issued by Sun. Could this material actually have been recorded by the same man who had just issued "Bear
Cat" and was holding preliminary sessions with Little Junior Parker?

The only thing we know for sure about Janie McFadden is that she recorded with the same Dusty Brooks band that
produced SUN 182. Session logs indicate that Janie sang on one title ("Two Blue Devils") out of the seven that were sent or leased to Sam Phillips in 1953. All of which tells us nothing about Janie McFadden. Might she have been the sister of Ruthie
McFadden, who recorded pop/rhythm and blues for Old Town Record in the 1950s and later reivented herself as a soul singer (on Gamble and SureShot Records) in the 1970s?

Fred Knobloch is born in Jackson, Mississippi. He earns hits as a solo artist and as a member of Schuyler, Knobloch and Overstreet during the 1980s. He also writes George Strait's ''Meanwhile'' and Lorrie Morgan's ''Back In
Your Arms Again''.

APRIL 30, 1953 THURSDAY

Merrill Osmond is born in Ogden, Utah. With his brothers, he forms The Osmonds, gaining
major pop success in the 1970s and netting a 1982 country hit, ''I Think About Your Lovin'''. The group sings backing vocals on Conway Twitty's ''Heartache Tonight''.

MAY 1, 1953 FRIDAY

Pop singer and producer Glen Ballard is born in Natchez, Mississippi. Known for his work with Alanis Morissette and Wilson Phillips, he also co-writes the George Strait country hit ''You Look So Good In Love''.

MAY 4, 1953 MONDAY

Justin Tubb begins working as a disc jockey on radio station WHIN in Gallatin, Tennessee.

Kathlyn Louise White is born. At age 21, she gives up her crown as Miss Utah to marry Wayne Osmond of The Osmonds.

Songwriter John Jarrard is born in Gainesville, Georgia. He authors such hits as George
Strait's ''Blue Clear Sky'', John Anderson's ''Money In The Bank'', Diamond Ris's ''Mirror Mirror'' and Collin Raye's ''My Kind Of Girl''.

MAY 8, 1953 FRIDAY

Billy Burnette is born in Memphis, son of rockabilly figure Dorsey Burnette. Nominated for the Academy of Country Music's Top New Male award in 1986, he becomes a member of Fleetwood Mac for several years and writes Eddy Raven's ''She's Gonna
Win Your Heart'' and George Strait's ''River Of Love''.

''Iron
Mountain Trail'' appears in theaters, with Rex Allen and his horse, Koko, coming to the aid of the Pony Express.

MAY 8, 1953 FRIDAY

F5 Tornado strikes
Waco in Texas leaving 114 dead and 597 injured, The Tornado was one of the many storm disasters for the development of a nationwide severe weather warning system.

MAY 15, 1953 FRIDAY

Jim Reeves receives top billing on The Louisiana Hayride for the first time.

Ricky Nelson and his brother, David, appear on the cover of TV Guide.

MAY 16, 1953 SATURDAY

Pop vocalist
Richard Page is born in Keokuk, Iowa. Known for his work with Mr. Mister, he also sings on Anne Murray's ''Now And Forever (You And Me)'' and ''Time Don't Run Out On Me'', plus hits by Juice Newton.

Originating from Gumwood, Arizona, James DeBerry harks right back to the Memphis Jug Band days of 1939, which was when he first recorded for Vocalion and Okeh.
His main claim to fame lies in "Easy", a languid instrumental duet with harp wizard Walter Horton that preceded this session by just a matter of weeks.

DeBerry's erratic metre heard here, is matched by a piano that is so wonderfully cranky, it makes the average set
of honky tonk keys sound like a Bechstein grand.

STUDIO SESSION FOR JIMMY DEBERRY

AT THE MEMPHIS RECORDING SERVICE FOR SUN RECORDS
1953

SUN
RECORDING STUDIO

706 UNION AVENUE, MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

SUN SESSION: SATURDAY MAY 16, 1953

SESSION HOURS: UNKNOWN

PRODUCER AND RECORDING ENGINEER - SAM C. PHILLIPS

Sam Phillips brought Jimmy DeBerry back into the studio to cut a solo single. For the benefit of younger listeners, party lines weren't sexual hook-up call-in numbers,
but a fact of life, especially in rural communities. Two or more telephone subscribers were on the same loop and could hear each other's calls, even though every subscriber had an individual ring tone. Billy Murray satirized them on 1917 Edison cylinder as
did Hank Williams on his 1949 hit ''Mind Your Own Business'' (''The woman on our party line's a nosy thing/She picks up her receiver when she knows it's my ring''). Over Mose Vinson's jangly piano, DeBerry lays down a very spare and soulful performance, and
it's more effective when Vinson lays out, leaving DeBerry alone. DeBerry had a true blues voice, even it it was more of a pre-War blues voice: mellow and wracked with emotion. We should have heard more from him.

This standout cut, was a primitive twelve-bar blues, although DeBerry's acoustic guitar and foot tapping provide a surprisingly
full sound and lifted note-for-note from a 1941 Robert Jr. Lockwood recording of the same name, was a simple invitation to an ex-girlfriend to rekindle the passion, that Sam Phillips characterizes as "one of the real classic recordings of the blues.
It was so basic, yet it had such feel to it".

On the face of it, Jimmy DeBerry does not deserve the obscure status into which he seems to have been consigned. his entire recorded
studio output was restricted to two pre-War singles for Vocalion and OKeh, together with his two Sun singles - a meagre output for someone possessed of such obvious talent. This side showcases his abilities as a superbly expressive vocalist: however,
it also serves to demonstrate his biggest problem, i.e. one of timing - which is further exacerbated by some asthmatic-sounding groans during the solo.

The song, credited to DeBerry and Sam Phillips (under
the name of Sam Burns), the song was based quite closely on Robert Lockwood's 1941 recording of ''Take A Little Walk With Me'', itself based on ''Sweet Home Chicago''.

The fuller instrumentation suggests that this song may have been the plug side but it is markedly inferior to its flipside. This is arguably the least affecting and sloppiest of
DeBerry's recordings for Sam Phillips. Here DeBerry with pianist Mose Vinson, for these two fine examples of country blues as heard in and around Memphis into the 1950s. Drum support was provided
somewhat oddly by one Raymond Jones who appears to have been a white man who led a small combo on some unissued Sun pop recordings from the same era. DeBerry's timing problems have become so pronounced that it is difficult to appreciate the track
on its own terms.

Here Jimmy played crude electric guitar, and Sam Phillips recorded the piano from Mose Vinson so, that it sounded like the kind of honky-tonk upright you might hear if you wandered into your local barroom. Just as they completed the second
chorus and were about to launch into a tinny piano solo, there was the shrill sound of the telephone ringing in the outer office. Far from taking this as a deterrent, well, who knows exactly what went on in Sam's mind, whether he somehow or other made a thematic
connection between the interruption of the telephone and the song's message, or to Sam's ears the phone's ring was simply in tune with the band. You know, we think just let Sam tell it. But remember, that phone remained a part of the record for all eternity.

According to Sam, ''I love perfect imperfection, I really
do, and that's not just some cute saying, that's a fact. Perfect? That's the devil. Who in this world would want to be perfect? They should strike the damn thing out of the language of the human race. You think I was going to throw that cut away for one of
them good ones that didn't have a telephone ringing in the middle of it? Hell, no, that's what was happening. That was real. You know how much it would cost to make a noise like that as a sound effect, by pushing a button? And that ain't the real thing. People
want the real thing. There's too much powder and rouge around. You know, I'm a crazy guy when it comes to sound''.

Phillips felt that it should have been a hit, although he probably underestimated the sophistication of the rhythm and blues market
in 1953. Yet again one understand his point; the compelling drive of the recording more than compensates for the obvious technical deficiencies, including a wobbly beat and some asthmatic wheezing during the guitar break. The stark
primitivism of Horton's "Easy" and DeBerry's work reflected Sam Phillips' personal taste as much as anything.

"When I was leasing to other labels", he said, "those labels wanted me to compromise. They wanted a fuller blues sound that I did. They were selling excitement''. ''I was
recording the feel I found in the blues. I wanted to get that gut feel onto record. I realized that it was going to be much more difficult to merchandise than what Atlantic or Specialty, for example, were doing, but I was willing to go with
it".

Again, the Burns' who claims half of the composer credits is none other than Phillips, whose wife's maiden
name was Burns. In January 1954, DeBerry's contract was up, and Phillips wrote to him in Jackson, Tennessee, saying, ''Even though we have been unsuccessful until now in getting anything on you that has proved to be commercial (from a sales point of view)
we still believe we can come up with something''. At that point, DeBerry was owned $12.45 in back royalties, but never, as far as we know, recorded at Sun again. In fact, he made no further recordings, except a comeback session for Steve LaVere.

Sun 182 ''Heaven Or Fire'' b/w ''Tears And Wine'' by Dusty Brooks and His Tones is released. These recordings were provided by Jim Bulleit in Nashville and were the first very few sides that Sun leased from other labels.

According to Billboard, "Word has it that Rufus Thomas Jr., who waxed the smash "Bear
C at" for Sun Records, is turning down many a one-nighter so he can remain mike side at his WDIA deejay post". Nevertheless, Rufus did from a touring band of sorts, called the Bearcats. He said, "I worked all over Memphis.
We had four of five pieces in the band most times. We did a lot of work after I had "Bear Cat" out".

Sam
Phillips' partner, Jim Bulleit, was thrown into something of a panic. He commissioned a formal comparison study, which only went to prove what Sam had known all along. The two songs ''Hound Dog'' and ''Bear Cat'' were identical. He questioned whether Sam fully
understood the business of publishing. He pleaded with Sam to release more product, since ''releasing is the life of this business... Don't let the distributors forget us''. And he constantly asked for money, stressing in one letter, ''I wouldn't nor haven't
asked for money unless I needed it. Please understand and let me have the money, please''.

In the end Sam Phillips settled. He knew he was in the wrong, given the new copyright climate, and he had neither the resources nor the inclination to drag out what seemed certain to be a losing battle. Sam Phillips pays
Don Robey's Lion Music $1580,80 in settlement of the ''Bear Cat'' case, and gave up all claims to the publishing. The record itself was an unqualified triumph. sales kept climbing, and it eventually reached number 3 on the rhythm and blues charts, not dropping
off again till the middle of June. Sam had already had big hits with other labels, but this was the first he had ever had on his own. And even if in the end, for all of the spirit that Rufus Thomas brought to it, there was no denying that it was a ''copy''
tune, and in spite of all the legal and financial trouble it had caused him, nothing could diminish the satisfaction he took, the pride that came with Sun Records' first real breakthrough success.

It caused him to redouble his effort in the studio, to redouble his efforts to get to know the disc jockeys, the distributors,
all the people he would need to make a go of it in the business. He was disturbed by what he was beginning to see as Jim Bulleit's lack of good judgment when it came to sizing up people, many of Jim's distributors seemed poor prospects for Sun's type of material,
and when they did place orders, it was almost impossible to get some of them to pay, but Sam wasn't sure how much of that could be attributed to Jim's almost permanent state of impecuniousness. In any case he was not to be deterred. He had always thought of
the studio as his cathedral. Now he saw it more as a kind of living presence. ''What we had'', he said, ''was a church of the spirit that fed on itself'', a house of worship in which he could express his faith in his own unequivocally private terms.

The Davis Sisters, Skeeter Davis and the unrelated Betty Jack Davis recorded ''I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know''. An auto accident kills
Betty Jack in August, making this the only hit record they cut together.

Ruben
Tarpley, the father of eight-year-old Brenda Lee, dies from a freak accident, after being hit on the head by a hammer during a construction project in Georgia.

MAY 25, 1953 MONDAY

Guitarist Rich Alves, from Pirates Of The Mississippi, is born in Pleasanton, California. He co-produces and plays on the band's lone hit, 1991's ''Feed Jake''. He also plays on hits by Leon Everette, Mickey Gilley and Bobby Bare.

MAY 26, 1953 TUESDAY

Meridian, Mississippi, dedicates a monument to the late Jimmie Rogers, following a drive engineered by Hank Snow and Ernest
Tubb. On hand for the ceremonies are Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, Charlie Monroe, Minnie Pearl and Lefty Frizzell.

Note: Sam Phillips' notebook showed the session on May 28, 1953 with Walter Horton, Joe Hill Louis, Albert Williams, and Pat Hare. It's possible that the
Joe Hill Louis session was recorded that day with Pat Hare playing guitar and Joe Hill Louis playing drums. Sun's check register shows food expenses for May 27 and checks
made out that day to Walter Horton, Joe Hill Louis, and Albert Williams.

01 - "HYDRAMATIC WOMAN" - B.M.I. - 2:39

Composer: - Joe Hill
Louis

Publisher: - Copyright Control

Matrix number: - None - Not Originally Issued

Recorded: - May 27, 1953

Released: - 1969

First appearance: - P-Vine Records (LP) 33rpm
PLP 304 mono

THE BE-BOP-BOY

Reissued: - 1986 Charly Records (LP) 33rpm Sunbox 105 mono

SUN RECORDS - THE BLUES YEARS 1950 - 1956

Louis had previously recorded ''Hydramatic Woman'' as
"Automatic Woman", both terms referring to the automatic transmissions found on early 1950s General Motors cars - whilst the song's lyrics consist of a series of clever car / woman metaphors. The solo works is shared by both
harmonica (Horton) and Joe's guitar, although this distortion tends to blend the two instruments together.

Joe Hill Louis's ''Hydramatic Woman'' and ''Tiger Man'' are on the same tape as Mose Vinson's recordings, and
Louis was noted as being present on Vinson's session, leading us and others to assume that the Louis recordings stemmed from one of the Vinson sessions. On closer examination, this is unlikely. The piano playing is more structured
than Vinson's eccentric style, and at the beginning of ''Tiger Man'', Louis says, ''Albert, start it off'', suggesting that it's Albert Williams. Additionally, Rufus Thomas's version of ''Tiger Man'' was on the street when
one of Vinson's sessions took place in September 1953, so it would make little sense to reprise it. In many ways, ''Hydramatic Woman'' was a belated ''Rocket 88'' spinoff. Louis's band hits a sweet groove as he places yet
another spin on the car-sex metaphor... just when you thought there couldn't be another.

''Hydramatic Woman'' didn't earn a spot on Phillips' release schedule, but another recording by Louis with saxophone appeared in 1954 on Bob Geddins' Big Town Records (slogan
''every one a hit'').

02 -
"TIGER MAN (KING OF THE JUNGLE)" - B.M.I. - 3:09

Composer: - Joe Hill Louis-Sonny Burns

Publisher: - Hi-Lo Music Incorporated

Matrix number: - None - with Count-In - Not Originally Issued

Recorded: - May 27, 1953

Released: - 1969

First appearance: - P-Vine Records (LP) 33rpm PLP 304 mono

THE
BE-BOP-BOY

Reissued: - 1986 Charly Records (LP) 33rpm Sunbox 105 mono

SUN RECORDS - THE BLUES YEARS 1950 - 1956

Beyond Albert Williams, it's tough to be certain of the identity of Louis's group. Clearly, it's not Louis playing harmonica because we hear it under the vocals. The drum part is simple, but
still too complicated for Louis to be playing while he's playing guitar. The harmonica playing is splendid... some of the best we've heard, elevating this recording above Thomas's in many respects. Walter Horton seems to be
the likeliest candidate. Louis references ''Bear Cat'' in the lyrics, so this was probably recorded in May 1953, after ''Bear Cat'' was a hit before Thomas's ''Tiger Man'' session. Beyond that, we know little for sure.

According Mose Vinson, he was adamant that this
wasn't cut at his session, and it's sufficiently odd that he would have probably remembered it. Audibly, it seems to hang with ''Tiger Man'' and ''Hydramatic Woman''. Certainly, it's on the same tape. We could be hearing Louis's
drummer performing the narration and percussion, but it could as easily be a shoe shine boy they brought in off the street to do his rap. There's just one take, suggesting that Phillips wanted to take it no further.

"Walter's Instrumental" is possibly from this session. Only the Bear
Family and the Redita LP utilize an original first generation acetate disc. The source for the others is a tape, on which two unsuccessful attempts to add echo via playback of an original acetate were made.

Columbia released Carl Smith's two-sided hit, ''Trademark'' backed by ''Do I Like It?''.

Sir Edmund Hillary, an explorer from New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepalese Sherpa, become the first people to successfully climb to the summit of Mount Everest in May of 1953. The pair stayed at the summit
for about fifteen minutes before they had to begin their descent due to low oxygen. Before Hillary and Norgay accomplished the feat several other mountaineers had attempted to reach the summit of the highest mountain but had never been successful and many
had even perished in the attempt.

MAY 30, 1953 SATURDAY

Fourteen-year-old Jimmy Boyd gets chased by a 2,000-pound bull during the Al Tansor
Rodeo at Memorial Auditorium in Canton, Ohio. He escapes harm by dashing into the dressing room.

At five feet, six inches, Rudy Grayzell might be smaller
than most, but he's larger than life. Did he go to Doug Sahm's school, telling the teacher that he was his uncle so that he could pull him out for road trips. Did he hang out with Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and other luminaries as often as
he says? Did he and Roy Orbison coin the word rockabilly in a Bossier City hotel? Did he sing ''Ducktail'' naked in a cemetery for a bunch of drunken girls? Were he and Link Davis chased by a ten-foot alligator in Lake Charles, Louisiana? Was
he really making love to a woman in a trailer when a tornado hit, throwing him onto the woman's mother? And what about the hermaphrodite and the five wives? You won't find better stories anywhere in rock and roll. You won't find more electric music
either.

Charlie Walker, a San Antonio disc jockey and recordings star landed Rudy Grayzell a spot on KMAC in San Antonio, selling Pear Beer. The omens were good: Ernest Tubb got his start
on KMAC selling beer. Because Walker was a disc jockey, he had the ear of the guys at the record labels and when he told them that they should sign an artist, they often did.

There are two accounts of how Rudy Grayzell ended up on Abbott Records. In the
first, Walker called the boss of Abbott Records, Fabor Robison, who split his time between Shreveport, Louisiana and Hollywood, California.

Fabor was in Shreveport part of the time because two of his top acts, Johnny Horton and Jim Reeves, were based there on the Louisiana Hayride, and he was in California
because his labels were based there. ''Fabor and Jim Reeves drove down from Shreveport to San Antonio, and that's where I recorded my first session. We did it at KWKH after the station went off the air''.

Rudy was acquired right around the time that Robison bought out his partner, drug store owner Sid Abbott, to assume full control
of Abbott (the date of the transaction was August 7, 1953 and the amount was $4575, for those interested). But Fabor had another quasi partner, Sylvester Cross at American Music in Los Angeles. Both versions of events come from Rudy, and the second
version he said that he sent out publishing demos to every music Publisher, and American Music replied, so it's possible that Sylvester Cross sent Robison to check out Grayzell. Either way, Rudy Grayzell was an Abbott recording artist as of mid-1953.

The big record throughout the
fall of 1952 and the spring of 1953 was Slim Willet's ''Don't Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes''. Very unlike any other country record to that point, it had an Hispanic rhythm and odd meter. Rudy's first recording for Abbott, ''Looking At The Moon
And Wishing On A Star'', had the same rhythm and tempo as Willet's oddball record, and Rudy tore into it with more lungpower than finesse. ''This is a ranchero which Grayzell really belts'', noted Billboard. ''Watch it and watch him. This could happen''.
It was issued under the name Grayzell at Fabor's insistence. Figuring that the country market wasn't ready to find another name. Rudy's great, great grandmother was a German immigrant whose name was anglicized to Grayzell, and he has been Rudy
Grayzell (almost) ever since. ''Looking At The Moon'' didn't chart, but probably sold quite well because Skeets McDonald covered it for Capitol and Charline Arthur for RCA. Rudy's version was issued in England on London Records, albeit in November
1954.

The first major integrated rock and roll show is staged in Cleveland with headlining
co-stars The Dominoes and Bill Haley & His Comets.

Queen Elizabeth II is crowned in Westminster Abbey.

Future Sun recording star Dean Beard moved to Coleman, Texas, in 1953, and Dean began working sessions in nearby Abilene for record producer Slim Williet (and in later years, he would hint darkly that he knew who really wrote Willet's smash
hit ''Don't Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes'').

MID 1953

The Tennessee press had been quick to pick up on the Prisonaires story. Dot Brimer of the Kingsport News wrote a feature on the Prisonaires on July 1, 1953 saying: ''They began with obscure appearances on seldom held Tenpen stage shows, progressing
though hopeless-seeming dead-end rehearsals to larger bits on inside shindigs, to a weekly 15-minute spot on Nashville's
WSOK to regular featuring on Tenpen's WSIX Saturday Night Varieties and a precedent-setting guest appearance on TV's Tennessee Jamboree and on to 50,000 watt WSM's big time George Morgan Show. James E. Edwards Tenpen's warden, has spearheaded the current campaign for progress. So far ''The Prisonaires''
is the only unit of live talent goodwill ambassadors that Tenpen is sending out. They are part of warden Edwards campaign to educate the people of Tennessee in matters concerning the basic weaknesses in out penal system. The warden is frankly using The Prisonaires to arouse interest
and then steps in and explains: ''For the first time in the history of the institution an organized effort is being made
to help inmates find jobs and in locating sponsors acceptable to the parole board and the attempt to get together an adequate parole program''.

Dot Brimer was writing just one month after the Prisonaires had been in Memphis raising their profile by making their first record under contract to Sun Records.
Sun's owner Sam Phillips told: ''Red Wortham was the one who set up the Prisonaires deal. He had a cousin working
as a senior guard at the penitentiary''. On the occasion of Wortham's visit with Joe Calloway, it seems that the focus of attention was the new Bragg and Riley song ''Just Walkin' In The Rain''. Wortham told Bragg that he could publish the song and thought that he could get it recorded too. Red Wortham said: ''So,
I made some recordings there in the prison and we had two good cuts on tape. I first took this tape to Dee Kilpatrick who was head of Mercury Records here in the southern district but he said no because he had another black group he was working with, so next I went to see Paul
Cohen of Decca Records. He had to run back and forth to New York all the time, but he said 'I'll be back in a few weeks and I'll talk to you about it'. Soon after, I was with Jim Bulleit in my office at Fourth and Union there. We were distributing Sun Records and Jim and Sam
were good friends. Jim said 'I'll cal Sam and see if he wants it'. I was kinda anxious to get it moving so I agreed. Well he called Sam and mailed the tape copy to him. He came back, and said 'Sam likes that tape and he'll put it out because he loves that song called ''Baby Please'',
but he wants you to go back in and record another song', because he thought ''Just Walkin' In The Rain'' wouldn't make it'''.

In a slightly different
version, Johnny Bragg told Bill Millar: ''A feller by the name of Red Wortham came to the prison along with a man named Jim Bulleit. Of course Sam Phillips was the president of Sun Records, he was the man that really had the right to say 'yes' or 'no' you know... and they were very satisfied with
that they heard, in fact they really flipped when they heard ''Just Walkin' In The Rain''. And they made arrangements for Sam to hear the Prisonaires''. Both Wortham and Bragg have mentioned in interviews that singer Chickie King was interest in the song and it is just possible that her version on Nashville's
Gold label was the first to be issued.

Sam Phillips agreed with the prison authorities that the Prisonaires could be taken to his studio in Memphis
on June 1, 1953 so that he could re-recorded the songs. The Prisonaires travelled under guard to Memphis on at least two occasions up to May 1954 and Sam Phillips also recorded them on at least two occasions in the auditorium
at the prison. Phillips recorded some twenty songs and released eight of them on four records by the Prisonaires, the first of which, ''Just Walkin' In The Rain'', was the best selling (a 200,000 seller according to
Ebony Magazine) though none of the discs appeared on the National sales charts.

And below another true
story on June 1, 1953.

JUNE 1953

Sam Phillips had another group under contract who weren't traveling anywhere except under armed guard. As part of the arrangement with Jim Bulleit, Sun acquired a black vocal group from Tennessee State Penitentiary
in Nashville, five inmates who called themselves the Prisonaires. The croup had been introduced to Bulleit by Red Wortham, a Nashville music publisher.

At that time, the pen was seen as a fertile source of new songs, and many of the Grand Ole Opry stars paid regular visits to buy material from both black and white
inmates. Wortham was on a similar quest when he heard about the Prisonaires.

Formed by lead singer Johnny Bragg shortly after he went inside in 1943, the group already had a steady gig on two local stations, WSOK and WSIX, and was part of warden James Edwards' rehabilitation program.
Edwards, a six foot two strapping World War II veteran, had served in a Marine Corps military battalion for twenty months after the war, assigned for most of that time to the Fort Meade prisoner stockade.
That experience, and governor Frank Clement's belief in him, were his only qualifications for the job. And when Edwards expressed some reservations about moving into the warden's quarters on the prison grounds with his wife and two daughters, Clement invoked
their shared faith, stressing how integral the social reforms he intended to implement were both to the welfare of the state and the simple Christian values which they both espoused.

Wortham gave Bulleit a rough demo tape of Bragg and the Prisonaires singing four songs (recorded
over an early performance by Pat Boone on WSIX). Bulleit forwarded the tape to Phillips. One of the songs, ''Just Walkin' In The Rain'', had been written by Bragg and another inmate, Robert Riley. They had been walking in the rain to
the prison laundry wondering, as Bragg put it, ''what the little girls are doing right about no''. Although Phillips had no love for their close-harmony, Ink Spots-inspired style, he saw the potential novelty slant, and, after some
tortuous negotiations, the Prisonaires, escorted by an armed guard and a trusty, arrived in Memphis on June 1, 1953. On the way, Bragg remarked, ''Gee, look at that funny cemetery''. He was seeing a drive-in movie lot for the just time.

Over the course of a session that lasted from 10:30
A.M. to 8:30 P.M., the Prisonaires honed ''Just Walkin' In The Rain'' to perfection. Phillips released it two week later. It started to get action almost immediately, no doubt due in part to the novelty appeal of the group, but also to
the beauty of the song and the stilling quality of Bragg's lead vocal. Against a wordless background vocal and a simple strummed guitar, he sang: ''Just walking in the rain. Getting soaking wet. Torturing my heart. By tryin' to forget...''.

After a meeting in Nashville with Jim Bulleit at
the end of July, Jud Phillips went out to see the group in the pen. They told him they were already getting ten to twenty-five fan letters a day. ''They plan to bring all of them to you when they come '', wrote Jud. ''They make me think
of a bunch of baby birds. They are one boys all of them. I get a great joy out of helping people like that and think the really appreciate it''. In November 1953 Ebony magazine reported that the record had sold 225,000 copies, although
50,000 was probably nearer the mark.

The
strictly segregated penitentiary where the Prisonaires were doing time had been dubbed Swafford's Graveyard after a notorious previous warden. Despite its rough reputation, the prison's new warden, Edwards, encouraged rehabilitation and
allowed the group out on day passes to perform on radio, and subsequently at live concerts. They even played some of the plusher white hotels in Nashville. Held up as examples of rehabilitation at work, they were introduced to Tennessee
governor Frank Clement, who regularly brought the group to the gubernatorial mansion for performances, thereby eliciting the unissued paean ''What About Frank Clement (A Mighty Mighty Man)'', a song that had ''parole, please!'' written
all over it.

Sam Phillips
and the Prisonaires blew their momentum by following ''Just Walkin' In The Rain'' with a gospel record, ''Softly And Tenderly;'', backed with ''My God Is Real'', featuring Ike Turner in the unaccustomed role of church pianist. A hokey
and hastily contrived third single, ''A Prisoner's Prayer'', was rushed onto the market, but the appeal of the group was fading fast. The last single was issued in July 1954. Just one year after the brouhaha surrounding their debut,
the group was forgotten again.

Some
of the Prisonaires were paroled in 1954 and 1955. Bragg remained inside and formed a group called the Marigolds. He was released in 1959, but soon found himself back in trouble, facing two counts of assaulting white women ''with intent
to ravish, murder, and rob''. Jailed again in 1960, he was visited by Elvis Presley, who asked him repeatedly if he needed a lawyer or any help. Needing help so badly he could taste it, Bragg nevertheless declined. He was eventually
released in 1967.

Bragg had
emerged from the pen in better financial shape than most ex convicts. He had half the proceeds from ''Just Walkin' In The Rain'' awaiting him. The publishing on the songs was purchased by Gene Autry in May 1954, and Autry himself recorded
it soon afterward, to small success. But Columbia's head of countryman A&R, Don Low, had faith in the song. One day, walking through the head once In New York, he met Mitch Miller, who was scouting material for a Johnnle
Ray session. Law suggested adjust ''Walkin' In The Rain'', and Ray took it to number 2 on the pop charts during the fall of 1956. The first writer's check Bragg receided was for fourteen hundred dollars. Bragg, who had never seen such
a sum on a check or anywhere, mistook it for fourteen dollars and asked the warden to deposit it in the commissary cash register so he could get some cigarettes and candy.

The Prisonaires' talent far transcended their novelty appeal. Bragg's breathtakingly pure
lead tenor could have put the group in the front rank of vocal groups. But they were drawing on traditions that were alien to Phillips, who recorded little else In the close-harmony style, either sacred or secular. He would
later say he regretted that he had not done more in the gospel held. He recorded one gospel single by the Brewsteraires for Chess, and released another by the Jones Brothers on the Sun label, but sales were poor. ''It certainly wasn't intentional
neglect'', he said In 1984, ''but you have to compromise. There's no telling what I should and could have done in gospel music from the Memphis area. I'm ashamed to say I barely touched the surface. It was a whole different area to merchandise,
and you run out of time after working eighteen hours a day''.

JUNE 1, 1953 MONDAY

Jim Bulleit, owner of Bullet Records in Nashville,
drove five singing prisoners in a specially modified elongated Chevrolet at the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville to Memphis. The Prisonaires arrived at 706 Union Avenue to make their first record for Sun Records (Sun 186). It is very likely, the item about the session in an article on June 2, 1953 from
reporter Clark Porteous, that captured the attention of Elvis Presley.

At 10:30 a.m., they grouped themselves around a microphone
at the Sun Records studio, at the junction of Union and Marshall Avenues in Memphis. The guard and the trusty went next
door to Dell Taylor's Restaurant for food and coffee, and the group tried to get a recording balance for Sun Records'
owner Sam Phillips, because the artists were not permitted to eat in the restaurant.

They sang
in the sweet close harmony style for which Phillips had little affection, so he called over to local bottling and vending don, Drew Canale, and asked if his houseboy, Joe Hill Louis, could come down and sit in on guitar. Louis' music was
at the polar opposite extreme of black music: raw, unsophisticated and bluesy. "You guys are good", said Louis to Bragg, "but you've got to stick together". Bragg replied that, with three of the group in for 99 years, there was not much
change of doing otherwise.

The story of Elvis Presley's association with Sun Records is essentially the story of three rapid transformations. A painfully shy nineteen-year-old kid was transformed
into a twenty-year- old strutting peacock. A singer with barely enough confidence to sing on the front porch was transformed into a performer who was being sought by virtually every major record label in the United States. And a
country singer was transformed into an artist with the potential to cross the rigid demarcation lines separating pop, country and western, and rhythm and blues.

It was an eventful seventeen months that Presley spent at Sun, and much of what happened has been taken for granted. For as long as most can remember, Elvis Presley has represented the
benchmark of success in popular music. Every other performer of epic stature is measured against him. It is hard to appreciate today that when Presley walked into Sun Records for the first time, he was a household name only in his own
household. Now that his achievement in blending pop, country, and rhythm and blues into a new hybrid has become a commonplace of American popular culture, it is difficult to understand how alien his music was in 1954.
It is even harder to view the course of Presley's early career through the correct end of the telescope, or to imagine a time when a record salesman would go into a store and encounter the riposte, ''Elvis who?''.

How did the shrinking violet of July 1954 become the self-proclaimed Hillbilly Cat of November 1952? And why was virtually every major record label in the United States
coming to Sam Phillips with checkbook in hand, willing to sign an artist whose appeal was largely untested outside
the South? It all happened very quickly, in a short period that deserves another look. Though it may be a clicks to say that Elvis Presley blended hillbilly music with rhythm and blues and pop, it has never been fully explained just how the music he created became so hot so quickly.

Popular wisdom, which has now taken on the power of a classical myth, has it that the first the world ever heard from Elvis Presley was in the summer of 1953, when Elvis
walked into the Sun studio to record a personal disc for his mother's birthday.

As some have pointed out, it is more likely, considering
that Gladys Presley's birthday was in the spring, that Presley made the first record for himself, to hear how he sounded. That first disc soon ended up in the hands of Presley's schoolmate Ed Leech. They shared a homeroom in the twelfth grade at Humes High and hung out together for a year or two.
By Leek's own account, he hung on to the disc, which coupled ''My Happiness with ''That's When Your Heartaches
Begin'', because his grandparents owned a record player and the Presley family didn't.

Either Sam Phillips or Marion Keisker noted that Presley
had a good feel for ballads and that he should be invited back. The personal disc was cut in the summer of 1953 (update: July 18,
1953); the invitation to audition for Sun came in May or June 1954. It seems inconceivable that there was no contact between Presley and Sun in the interim. Presley probably cut a second personal disc before Sam Phillips was impressed enough to ask him to record for Sun. Presley probably followed up, opportunistically,
with some appearances at the studio. At one time, Phillips recalled seeing him quite frequently, and remembered saying,
''Here's ol' Elvis coming to see what kind of star we can make of him today''.

One serious challenge to that scenario, though, comes from Johnny Bragg, the lead singer of the Prisonaires, who suggests that Elvis Presleys face was a familiar sight at Sun as early as June 1953. Bragg clearly recalled that Presley was present during the
all-day session on June 1, 1953 that resulted in ''Just Walkin' In The Rain''.

"I was having problems phrasing some of the words",
said Bragg. "Sam was ready to give up on it, and here come this guy out of nowhere, wearing raggedy blue jeans. He said, "I believe
I can help him pronounce the words". Sam got mad. He said, "Didn't I tell you to stay outta here? These men are prisoners. We're likely to be sued". I said, "If he thinks he can help me phrase this thing, give him a chance". I was getting disgusted because Sam didn't like "Just Walkin' In The Rain", and I knew it could
amount to something. Eventually, Sam said, "Ok, let him try", so we took a break, and Elvis Presley worked with me on my diction. He didn't know too much about what he was doing, but he worked with me on it, and when we went back, we got it the first cut".

According to Bragg, that visitor, was Elvis Presley. If so, it means he was hanging around the Sun studio a year before his first record was cut, which invites a minor
re-write of history. Bragg may have telescoped the time frame, confusing the first Prisonaires session with a later
one; certainly, there is no mention of Presley in his article. Still, its fairly clear that Elvis Presley met Bragg at some point in 1953 or early 1954 when the Prisonaires were recording for Sun. The last Prisonaires session logged at Sun was in February 1954, although they returned for another unlogged session, when
Sam Phillips recorded them over outtakes of Elvis Presley's reeltape "Good Rockin' Tonight". Elvis Presley remembered Johnny Bragg and went to the Tennessee State Penitentiary in 1960 to visit him - "He has known Bragg from back when he was starting out", said the accompanying report.

It is unclear how the Prisonaires came to be heard outside the prison walls. A contemporary report
stated that Joe Calloway of WSIX, Nashville, was at the prison for a newscast, heard the group and arranged for them to have a regular show on WSIX, and on the local black station, WSOK. Calloway's approach came as a wind of change was blowing
through the prison. Previously known as "Swafford's Graveyard" after the previous warden, the jail was now being managed by James Edwards, a friend of Governor Frank Clement, who wanted to prepare the inmates for their return to society.

Southern record mogul Jim Bulleit, who had helped bankroll Sun just a few months prior to this next recording, was the intermediary who put The Prisonaires together with Sam Phillips.
Bob Stanley Riley was, like the group, an inmate at Nashville's State stockade and could take credit for "Just Walkin' In The Rain" along with lead vocalist, Johnny Bragg. For the next recording, the flip side of their launch vehicle, Joe Hill Louis
was brought in to adds his chunky guitar phrases to Riley's beseeching lyric. To add to the growing plot, heartthrob crooner Johnnie Ray puts out a fresh version some three years after the original and this time, "Just Walkin' In The Rain" becomes an
international success. Soberingly, by then the group had split, their glory days already history.

Johnny Bragg and Robert Riley were walking to the prison laundry when Bragg remarked to Riley, ''Here we are walking in the rain. I wonder what the little girls are doing''? ''Just
Walkin' In The Rain'' was the song that stemmed from that observation, and it played to Bragg's strengths as a vocalist. The bridge (''People come to windows...'') perfectly captured the yearning and regret he must surely have felt on so many occasions during
his long incarceration. Although no lover of close harmony groups, Phillips released ''Just Walkin' In The Rain'' on July 8, 1953.

''We used to practice, practice, practice'', Johnny Bragg said. ''We didn't
have no microphones, so we used an echo with buckets. Everybody would get a bucket, and you could put that bucket up to your ears and, you know, a sound would come out. I wanted to be the Ink Spots, and I thought I could be the Ink Spots. I was young, crazy,
I didn't know. I used to sing sitting in the cell. People be hollering and clapping their hands, this was the black wing at that time. 'Listen to the nigger'. 'Listen at him'. 'Well, let the nigger sing a little bit'. 'He can sing, can't he?'''.

To Sam Phillips the demo possessed a delicate, quavering beauty, admirably seconded by William Stewart's classically spare guitar, but Sam thought it could achieve a greater intensity. And that's what they spent all day and well into the
night looking for. They worked and worked on it. ''Sam Phillips wanted everything to be perfect'', Johnny Bragg said many years after the fact. ''Ain't nothing wrong with that. We started early in the morning, and now it's four o'clock, five o'clock, six o'clock.
Mr. Sam was something else''.

Sam Phillips also
got great joy from watching the orders roll in. Ebony magazine reported that the record sold over 200,000 copies, and the group started making personal appearances on day passes throughout the state, and, with considerable complication, outside the state.
Although it didn't chart, ''Just Walkin' In The Rain'' was a hit. One who took notice was Joe Johnson who worked for Columbia's country artist and repertoire man, Don Law. Johnson soon moved to California to work for one of Law's acts, Gene Autry, and told
him about ''Just Walkin' In The Rain''. Autry acquired the music publishing from Wortham, who probably thought the song had run its course.

Johnson pitched the song to Don Law in 1956, who recorded it with one of his acts, Dick Richards. Law gave Richards' disc to Columbia's New York A&R man, Mitch
Miller, who produced Johnnie Ray's number 2 pop hit version. Bragg was invited to the annual BMI banquet in New York, but found himself otherwise engaged that night.

02
- "INTERVIEW JERRY PHILLIPS" - B.M.I. - 1:09

Like his brother Knox, Jerry Phillips perpetuates the family bloodline with a combination of pride and dignity. His indoctrination couldn't have been more appropriate, because at
aged of six he was allowed to sit in the Sun studio control room, where he watched his father record The Prisonaires singing "Just Walkin' In The Rain". Some twelve years later he found himself on the other side of the glass with The Jesters, a local
fraternity combo who delivered the last of the killer Sun singles, named by "Cadillac Man" SUN 400.

After the Prisonaires had sung ''Baby Please'' for Sam Phillips, he called over the vending
machine operator, Drew Canale, to ask if his houseboy, Joe Hill Louis, could come and sit in on guitar. Louis was at the poor opposite extreme of black music: raw, unsophisticated and bluesy. It took until 8:30 p.m. to finish the two songs. Louis imparted
a tough, bluesy edge to ''Baby Please'', for which he was paid $10.00, but the group persuaded Phillips that Louis should sit out ''Just Walkin' In The Rain''. They didn't wants its poignancy destroyed by his slash-and-burn guitar. Upon release, Phillips saw
''Baby Please'' as the plug side, and was surprised when ''Just Walkin' In The Rain'' became a hit.

''That Chick's Too Young To Fry'' is a spirited version of Louis Jordan, a dreamy pop song, a 5 Royales-type rhythm and blues number.

Name (Or. No. Of Instruments)

Johnny Bragg - Lead Tenor Vocal*

Ed Thurman
- Tenor Vocal

John Drue - Lead Tenor Vocal**

William Stewart - Baritone Vocal and Guitar

Marcell Sanders
- Bass Vocal

Possible Joe Hill Louis - Guitar

Willie Nix – Drums

When the session was finally over at 8:30 P.M., and they all poured back into the prison transport for the four-hour return drive to Nashville,
the final version had the intensity that Sam Phillips had been seeking all along, a quiet intensity but an altogether focused one, too. As with ''Baby Please'', he had gotten them to slightly advance the tempo, but with no diminution of control and fewer side
effects, as Johnny's spectacular falsetto was less frequently displayed and eliminated altogether at the end. The sound was more closely miked and, as a result, more intimate, the almost reverential conclusion both statelier and more spiritual. But overall
the feel was so close to the original, it would be hard to say what any of the exhausted participants might have thought. Except for Sam. To Sam they had done justice to an idea as well as a sound. And whether or not the record was a hit, they had accomplished
just what they had set out to do.

During 1953-1954, Luke McDaniel recorded twelve songs in three sessions for King Records
to a consistently high standard, but nothing broke away in the country charts and Luke, always irritated by poor royalty accounting, finally broke with King Records and moved to Mel-a-Dee Records, based in New Orleans and owned by Mel Mallory.

01 - ''I CAN'T GO'' - B.M.I. - 2:13

Composer: Luke McDaniel

Publisher: - Lois Music

Matrix
number: - K-3644

Recorded: - Unknown Date June 1953

Released: - November
1953

First appearance: - King Records (S) 78rpm standard single King 1276-A mono

I
CAN'T GO / FOR OLD TIME SHAKE

Reissued: Stomper Time (CD) 500/200rpm Stomper Time STCD 24-12 mono

LUKE MCDANIEL - MISSISSIPPI HONKY TONK ROCKABILLY MAN

02
– ''JUST FOR OLD TIME SAKE'' - B.M.I. - 2:50

Composer: Luke McDaniel

Publisher:
- Lois Music

Matrix number: - K-3645

Recorded: - Unknown Date June 1953

Released: - November 1953

First appearance: - King Records (S) 78rpm standard single King 1276-B
mono

FOR OLD TIME SHAKE / I CAN'T GO

Reissued: - Stomper Time (CD) 500/200rpm
Stomper Time STCD 24-26

LUKE MCDANIEL - MISSISSIPPI HONKY TONK ROCKABILLY MAN

03 – ''LET ME BE A SOUVENIR'' - B.M.I. - 2:24

Composer: Luke McDaniel

Publisher: - Lois Music

Matrix number: - K-3646

Recorded: - Unknown Date June 1953

Released: - July 1953

First appearance: - King Records (S) 78rpm standard single King 1247-A mono

LET ME BE A SOUVENIR / DRIVE ON

Reissued: - Stomper Time (CD) 500/200rpm Stomper Time STCD 24-21

LUKE MCDANIEL - MISSISSIPPI HONKY TONK ROCKABILLY MAN

04 – ''DRIVE ON'' - B.M.I. - 2:31

Composer: Luke McDaniel

Publisher: - Lois Music

Matrix number: - K-3647

Recorded: - Unknown Date June 1953

Released:
- July 1953

First appearance: - King Records (S) 78rpm standard single King 1247-B mono

At one of Roy Orbison's band gigs in McCamey's Lions Club, somebody offered them to
play a dance and pay them for it. The pay for that gig was as good as a hard working week's pay, so they agreed to do it even though they only knew 4 or 5 songs. They learned some more tunes in a rush practicing
at the Community Center, and started getting paid for what they liked doing. They were invited to tour West Texas with R. A. Lipscomb who was running for the office of district governor of the Lions Club in 1953. They attended
the 36th International Lions Club Convention in Chicago from July 3rd to July 11th of that year... Together with Mr. Lipscomb, they all stayed at the Conrad Hilton Hotel and the Wink Westerners performed in the
front lobby.

The Orioles "Crying In The Chapel" becomes the first
rhythm and blues hit to approach the Top Ten on the Billboard Pop Charts, stalling just short at number 11 late that summer.

It's clear from this ''Work With Her Boy'' that Douglas had done is share of entertaining. This is a man used to working audience with slickly
hip lyrics. This is straight out of the Nat Cole playbook, and it's clearly aimed at up-market black nightclubs or maybe even Nashville's white hotel lounges. If it's hard to know why Douglas was pitched to Phillips when there was an Excello deal in place,
it's not difficult to see why Phillips said no.

Nashville-based singer Tomas Douglas aka Shy Guy Douglas was a protege of Red Wortham, who brought the Prisonaires to Jim Bulleit and thence to Sun. The date on one of Douglas's tape
boxes is June 1, 1953, the same date as the Prisonaires' ''Just Walkin' In The Rain' session. That opens three possibilities: Douglas might have been invited guest on the prison bus that made its way to Memphis that day, even though no one remembered him;
of perhaps the date cited is wrong and Douglas travelled to Memphis another day; or perhaps this is a Nashville-made tape that Wortham submitted to Phillips on June 1, 1953.

What argues for a Nashville-made tape is that the recording sounds more like a one-mic demo than a Sun master. What argues for
a trip to Memphis is that an unidentified Nashville pianist once told record dealer Mike Smyth that he made a recording session ''for Sun with Shy Guy Douglas''.

One of Douglas's reels is taped over a hillbilly radio show from Florida that appears to date from the fall of 1952. And what makes it harder still to unravel is that around June 1, 1953,
Excello Records in Nashville issued another recording of Douglas singing ''Detroit Arrow''. On the Excello recording, Skippy Brooks reportedly playing piano, on this recording, the florid pianist was probably an employee of WLAC, Nashville, Richard Armstrong,
who had backed Douglas on his Delta/MGM recording of ''Raid On Cedar Street'' four years earlier and recorded for Randy's Records (the precursor of Dot) and for Tennessee Records. There are no clues about the guitarists identity. Finally, you'd think that
the ''Detroit Arrow'' would be one of the trains that took African Americans from the South to Detroit; but no, it ran from Detroit to Chicago.

02 - "DETROIT ARROW BLUES" - B.M.I. - 2:08

Composer: - Shy Guy Douglas

Publisher: - Delta Music Incorporated

Matrix number: - None - Not Originally Issued

Recorded: - Probably June 1, 1953

Released: - September 1977

First appearance: - Charly Records (LP) 33rpm CR 30126-A-8
mono

SUN: THE ROOTS OF ROCK - VOLUME 11 - MEMPHIS BLUES SOUNDS

Reissued: - 1996 Charly Records (CD) 500/200rpm CDSUNBOX 7-5-11 mono

SUN RECORDS - THE BLUES YEARS 1950 - 1958

There's a fairly well known rhythm and blues song titled ''Hip Shakin' Mama''.
Chubby Newsome originated it and Irma Thomas still sings it, but this ain't it. This is Mr. Shy Guy's very own calling card but his lightweight voice and the flowery piano aren't really suited to this tempo and this type of braggadocio. Again, you can almost
hear the tinkling of glasses in the background and the polite, indifferent applause at the end. It's out of character with just about everything else in, and Sam Phillips clearly didn't think he needed it. In all likelihood, this is the same song that Douglas
recorded for Red Wortham and Jim Bulleit in 1948 as ''Shy Guy's Back In Town''. It was part of a four-song session for Bullet's Delta Records, later sold or leased to MGM. Neither Delta nor MGM released ''Shy Guy's Back In Town''.

Jim Reeves' role as an announcer for KWKH's The Louisiana Hayride comes to an end as disc jockey, Norman Bale replaces him. Reeves is free to work The Hayride strictly as a performer.

Ronnie Dunn is born in Coleman, Oklahoma. The lanky singer teams with Kix Brooks to form the harmoni-laden Brooks and Dunn, whose mix of honky tonk with rock influences makes them the dominant
duo in country from 1991 until their split in 2010.

JUNE 2, 1953 TUESDAY

Queen
Elizabeth II’s coronation took place in the United Kingdom. The coronation was held at Westminster Abbey where thousands of guests gathered to witness the historical event. Elizabeth’s father King George VI had passed away during February of the
previous year, and not long after his death Elizabeth began her duties as a monarch. She was not formally crowned until the coronation as it was tradition to allow several months to pass for mourning of the previous monarch. It was the first coronation service
to be broadcast on television. In the boys choir is Keith Richards who will co-write The Rolling Stones' ''Honky Tonk Woman'' ranked in a Country Music Foundation book among country's 500 greatest singles.

JUNE 3, 1953 WEDNESDAY

Elvis' L.C. Humes High School commencement, a joyous moment for the Presley family finally arrived. On that muggy
Wednesday night, Elvis Presley anxiously entered the spacious Ellis Auditorium's South Hall for the graduation ceremony. In his subdued black tie and new white shirt, Elvis Presley felt awkward as he walked into the hall with his classmates. As the Class 202 members of the Humes class of 1953 marched forward to accept their diplomas, there was an uncomfortable feeling in Elvis' stomach.

As Elvis Presley wandered into the Ellis Auditorium, he met George Klein, the Humes High class president. They were both poor boys who were
highly successful overachievers. Elvis Presley admired Klein's poise and self-assurance, and George Klein was smitten with Elvis' musical talent.

The bubbly sense of anticipation that erupts during
a High School graduation was evident as each student shook principal T.C. Brindley's hand and received a diploma from the superintendent of the Memphis
Public Schools, E.C. Ball. As Elvis Presley left on stage, he turned to Billy Leaptrott, a classmate and photographer, and remarked: "I don't got it". It was
Elvis Presley's humorous way of suggesting that, despite his rural Southern background, he was smarter than many people realized. Elvis Presley always took care to use proper English, and his remark was a cutting reference to the strict class lines that prevailed in Memphis society.

Joseph ''Joe'' Dobbins wasn't exactly a "spring-chicken" when he recorded his one and only record in Memphis being around 50 years old.
Dobbins was born in Brinkley, Arkansas on September 9, 1901. After his debut disc he never recorded again until he teamed up with guitarist Mike Stewart (Backwards Sam Firk) recording
as a duet at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis for Adelphi Records for two recordings in 1970. Dobbins died in Memphis later that year in December.

STUDIO SESSION FOR JOSEPH DOBBINS & THE FOUR CRUISERS

AT THE MEMPHIS RECORDING SERVICE FOR CHESS RECORDS 1953

SUN RECORDING STUDIO

706 UNION AVENUE, MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

SUN SESSION: WEDNESDAY JUNE 3, 1953

SESSION
HOURS: UNKNOWN

PRODUCER AND RECORDING ENGINEER - SAM C. PHILLIPS

So what led discographers to think that this might be one of Sam Phillips' recordings? A couple
of reasons: the leader of the Four Cruisers, Joe Dobbins, was based in Memphis throughout most of his long career, and Phillips was supplying masters to Chess around this time. Against that, you could argue that Dobbins' single sounds nothing like a Memphis
Recording Service session and Phillips had fallen out with Chess several months before it was recorded. Recently, some researchers have suggested that Howlin' Wolf's post-Phillips Memphis session was held at Lester Bihari's Memphis studio. Bihari, of course,
ran Meteor Records, but it seems unlikely that Leonard Chess would record there because he'd stolen Bihari's charter act, Elmore James. Dobbins' session was roughly contemporaneous with Wolf's last Memphis session, though, so it's at least possible that
Leonard Chess A&R'd them both at a studio other than Phillips.

Over the course of a long and fairly detailed oral history, Dobbins didn't go into much depth about this single. ''I wrote my first number in 1943 or 1943'', he told
Harry Godwin in 1967. ''I wrote ''Beale Street Shuffle'' and ''On Account Of You''. They didn't do so good because I didn't know how to arrange at that particular time, and I quit playing again for about eight or nine years''. Dobbins probably meant 1952 or
1953, and gave no clue as to the identity of the three unidentified Cruisers or where he recorded the session. So we're left with a pleasant, if innocuous, instrumental that's of interest only because it appeared on Chess and might have been Sam Phillips'
last recording for that label.

As Joe Dobbins (Not Dobbin as the label stated) comes to the fore, it again becomes clear that this doesn't sound like one of Phillips' recordings if for no other reason than the vocal
is poorly recorded. By 1953, Phillips had achieved a very bright, urgent, and ballsy vocal sound. It would be wrong to say that Phillips didn't record this type of music, though. Within weeks of Dobbins' session, wherever it was held, Phillips recorded Big
Memphis Ma Rainey, who played much the same places in much the same style. And although Chess has become indelibly associated with Chicago blues it's easy to forget that the Chess brothers began their music career in the nightclub business and always recorded
what can best be described as suppperclub entertainment. Although not as studiedly cool as Charles Brown, this was still supperclub blues. Thus we're left with more questions than answers about a record that deserves few of either.

The morning after graduation, Elvis Presley
trekked down to the state-run Tennessee Employment Security Office, located at 122 Union Avenue, filled out his application for work and sat waiting for an interview and evaluation. That Thursday morning was the day that Elvis Presley reported to work at the
M.B. Parker Machinist Company owned by M.B. Parker.

The first sign of dissatisfaction with the Parker Company occurred when
Elvis Presley reported to David Parker, the boss' son, and complained about being assigned to an eightman crew stripping nail kegs from equipment about to be reconditioned.

The tedious work bothered Elvis Presley, so he talked at length about his show business aspirations. The withholding statement when Elvis worked for M.B. Parker is 3 1/4x7 inches. "A job. Any job. I just want to work", Elvis Presley told
the interviewer. That same afternoon, M.B. Parker stopped by Tennessee Employment to see if maybe he could find a helper for his shop. Parker's small company, in the nearby Thomas-Chelsea area (which later would house American Sound Studio), paired small engines.
It was dirty work. Greasy work. But it was steady work and it handed out paychecks every other Saturday. "Mr. Parker", the interviewer said, "I had a young man come in here this morning you might want to talk to. He was nice and clean. Very polite. said 'yes
sir' and 'no sir'. Just graduated last night from Humes". "He sounds okay", Parker said. Send him to see me". "Well, now, Mr. Parker", the interviewer fudged, "you might not like him when you see him". "Why not?". "Because he's got long sideburns". "Well,
send him around anyhow".

And a day or so later, Elvis Presley began learning to repair small engines for M.B. Parker. It really was dirty
work, but Elvis was very much looking forward to that first paycheck because he had plans for some of the money he had earned. Big plans.

JUNE
5, 1953 FRIDAY

Rex Allen recorded ''Crying In The Chapel'' at the Castle Studio in Nashville.

JUNE 6, 1953 SATURDAY

NBC-TV rolls out the summer series ''Saturday
Night Revue'', with host Hoagy Carmichael, a co-writer of ''Georgia On My Mind''.

''Take These Chains From My Heart'' returns the late
Hank Williams to number 1 on the Billboard country singles chart.

Almost as successful on the commercial level, and far more so
artistically, was a record Phillips produced in the early summer of 1953 by another waiting-to-break local artist, Little Junior Parker.

Parker had hosted his own show on KWEM in West Memphis, and it was there that Ike Turner recorded him for the Biharis in 1951 or 1952. By that point, Parker had assembled his own band, in which the linchpin
was guitarist Floyd Murphy.

The brother of another accomplished blues guitarist, Matt ''Guitar'' Murphy,
Floyd was as technically adroit as any picker who ever set up his amp in Phillips' studio, ''He had this tremendous ability to make the guitar sound like two guitar's'', Phillips remembers, an ability that was showcased on Parker's Sun
debut.

Parker, with Murphy and the band in tow, had auditioned for Phillips at some point in 1953, playing their brand of slick, uptown rhythm and blues. But
Phillips wanted to hear something a little rougher, so the group worked up a tune called ''Feelin' Good'', with a nod to the king of the one-chord boogies, John Lee Hooker. Parker himself apparently despised that simplistic
style of music, but Phillips was convinced he heard something marketable in the record; he released it in July 1953. On October 3 it entered the national rhythm and blues charts, to Parker's surprise, peaking at number 5 during its six-week
stay.

Called back for another session, Parker brought a more, elegiac blues called ''Mystery Train'', a phrase
that appears nowhere in the song but well characterizes the aura Parker and Phillips created In the studio. It is a slow, atmospheric piece in which a loping, syncopated beat, slap bass, and gently moaning tenor sax coalesce to produce
a ghostly performance. But at the time, its poise, understatement, and lack of an obvious ''hook'' were sure predictors of commercial oblivion Almost as remarkable was the flip side, ''Love My Baby'', whose pronounced hillbilly
flavor might just qualify it as the first black rockabilly record. Released in November, the record failed to sustain the momentum of ''Feelin' Good'' and Parker began to get itchy feet.

Parker had joined Johnny Ace and Bobby Bland on the Blues Consolidated tours booked by Don Robey at Duke/Peacock Records. Parker was induced to sign with Duke, prompting Phillips to file a suit
against Robey. When the came to trial, Phillips won a $17,500 settlement, which must have carried some personal gratification after the loss on ''Bear Cat''. Phillips also seems to have acquired 50 percent of ''Mystery Train'' at approximately
the same time; when Elvis Presley's version appeared as his final Sun single almost two years later, it was published by Phillips' Hi-Lo Music, with Phillips' name appended to the composer credit.

Continuing to record for Robey, Parker worked as part of the Blues Consolidated Revue until Johnny Ace killed himself backstage in Houston on
Christmas Eve 1954. Herman Parker and Bobby Bland continued to work together, touring the black lounges and night spots. Parker scored fairly consistent hits in the Rhythm & Blues market for some years; ironically, after leaving
Duke, his music edged closer to the primitive blues feel he had disavowed in Memphis. He died during brain surgery in Chicago on November 18, 1971.

The notion of a distant locomotive whistle replicated by a chiming blues guitar over a rhythm set to a loping rhumba boogie, epitomises numerous Sun recordings.
For many years the Cotton Belt railroads hauled a procession of passenger traffic through Memphis Union Station and the essence and imagery of the machinery inspired many a songwriter. Herman "Junior" Parker was no exception and his upbeat-titles
"Feelin' Good" racked up a second hit for Sun Records.

There are several mysteries surrounding Sun's second major hit: the identity of some of the sidesmen is uncertain, and the actual recording date has proved impossible to pinpoint accurately. Furthermore,
it had long been assumed that two guitarists had played on the session: however in a mid-1980s interview Sam Phillips recalled that Floyd Murphy exhibited an amazing dexterity on the guitar, mix: "...he could make it sound like there were two
men playing at once". The entire performance owes a huge debt to the King of the one-chord boogie John Lee Hooker - although it is interesting to note that Junior Parker actually perceived himself as a slick uptown crooner, and disavowed Hooker's
countrified boogies. Legend has it that Sam Phillips was not enamoured of the material which Parker and co were auditioning, so when Sam left the studio to take a phone call they agreed to give him a taste of real down-home music. Sam Phillips was
knocked out, promptly recorded their efforts, and to the group's astonishment "Feelin' Good" became a massive hit.

On November 14, Sam Phillips paid $50.23 in royalties to both Parker and the session' pianist William ''Struction'' Johnson, suggesting that Johnson might have
been the co-leader of the Blue Flames (certainly, when Parker began recording for Duke, his group was billed as Bill Johnson's Blue Flames).

This mellow outing - based
heavenly on Eddie Boyd's "Five Long Years" - stands in marked contrast to its topside, being rather closer stylistically to what Junior would have preferred to have been singing. He had already defined his croony blues style - somewhat akin to that
of Roy Brown - although the band brings rather more a jazzy feel to his support here than subsequent sidesmen would. When he revived "Five Long Years" for Duke Records in 1958, Parker's vocal was virtually a note-for-note reconstruction of this performance.

Note: Sam Phillips' cheque register for this date shows Houston Stokes playing drums. Floyd Murphy probably supplied the information that John Bowers was the drummer,
but Stokes almost certainly worked the session.

Herman "Junior" Parker reportedly looked askance at the old time music but, while Sam Phillips was taking a break, the group decided to give him a country boogie so that they could go home. Titled, "Feelin' Good",
it owed a considerable dept to the King of the One Chord Boogies, John Lee Hooker, with exactly the same moral as the Hooker, the same seemingly extemporized spoken passages, and the same rhythm, but with an ensemble drive (Hooker's record was solo) and a
playful melodic approach that were strikingly new. Sam Phillips kept encouraging them to intensify the feeling, to fuse their efforts together more tightly, and in the end they got it, with the pianist's left hand providing the structure and Floyd Murphy's
guitar providing blazing rhythm riffs all the way to a natural fade at the end. ''Once we got that rhythm going, all I did was get Junior, when he said, 'Well', I just had him hold that note. I mean, he held it a little while, but that wasn't enough. I wanted
to hear 'Wellllll' as long as he could hold it, and just boogie behind'', says Sam Phillips.

That note was the key to the song's success. When Junior came into the first chorus after a breezy spoken intro taken directly from Hooker (''You know, the other day
I was walking down the street / I met an old friend of mine''), that first, single-syllable word took on almost all the properties of a chorus in itself. Stretching it out for a full four bars, Little Junior turned ''Well'' into a breathlessly elongated ''Whoaaaaa''
until finally, he hit the release button and broke into the lyric (''Feel so good / Gonna boogie till the break of day'') that was the message of the song. When the record came out three weeks later, following right behind the Prisonaires', Sam Phillips
felt like Sun Records was finally, really on the map.

Junior Parker held out greater hopes for the flip side, "Fussin' And Fightin' Blues", Little Junior strutted his sophisticated stuff and the band brought more than a touch of jazz styling to the backing, which reflected his
predilection for urban, jazzy blues. However, to his surprise, it was "Feelin' Good" that became his first hit in October 1953. The record spent six weeks on the national charts during the summer of 1953, peaking at number 5. Billboards' supported
Phillips' view "a wonderfully humorous and infectious southern blues... The beat and or work behind the singer is sensational".

MATT MURPHY - Born as Matthew Tyler Murphy known as Matt "Guitar" Murphy, was an American blues guitarist. He was associated with the bands of Robert ''Bobby'' Bland, Howlin' Wolf
and Little Junior Parker. Murphy play some fine fills and takes a flowing solo of the kind heard on Junior Parker's contemporary Sun recordings in 1952-1953 as ''Feelin' Good'' b/w ''Fussin' And Fightin' Blues'' (Sun 187) and ''Love Me Baby'' b/w ''Mystery
Train'' (Sun 192). Sam Phillips recalled that Floyd Murphy exhibited an amazing dexterity on the guitar, mix: "...he could make it sound like there were two men playing at once".

Murphy was born in Sunflower, Mississippi on December 29, 1929, and was educated in Memphis, Tennessee, where his father worked at the Peabody Hotel at Union Avenue. Murphy learned to play guitar when he was a child.
In the mid-1950s he moved to Chicago, where he joined the Howlin' Wolf band, which at the time featured Little Junior Parker.

Murphy
worked a lot with Memphis Slim, including on his album At the Gate of Horn (1959). Murphy did not have a band of his own until 1982 but did work in the studio and on stage with many musicians, including Ike Turner, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, Otis Rush, Etta
James, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Chuck Berry and Joe Louis Walker.

He gave a memorable performance in 1963 on the American Folk
Blues Festival tour of Europe with his "Matt's Guitar Boogie". Freddie King is said to have once admitted that he based his "Hide Away" on Murphy's playing during this performance. (King originally recorded "Hide Away" 3 years earlier, on 1960.08.26, and also
said it was based on Hound Dog Taylor's "Taylor's Boogie''. No version of "Matt's Guitar Boogie" is seen on Memphis Slim or other albums with Matt before "Hide Away").

In
1978, Murphy joined the Blues Brothers. He appeared in the films The Blues Brothers (1980) and Blues Brothers 2000 (1998), playing the husband of Aretha Franklin. He performed with the Blues Brothers Band until the early 2000s

Murphy suffered a stroke in the summer of 2002 but returned to perform a few years later. He played a reunion performance with James Cotton at the 2010 Chicago Blues Festival. A 1986 live recording
of a performance at the 40 Watt Club, in Athens, Georgia, was released in September 2011. Patton Biddle recorded the show; Murphy's nephew, Floyd Murphy Jr., played the drums, and Howard Eldridge provided vocals. Murphy appeared in April 2013 at Eric Clapton's
Crossroads Guitar Festival at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Murphy's signature guitar is manufactured by Cort Guitars.
He visited the Cort factory in Korea in 1998, and later that year the MGM-1 was introduced. Most of these guitars have a sunburst or honey finish. They are made of agathis, with a mahogany neck, and have two humbuckers and single volume and tone controls.
This model was produced until 2006; 78 were sold, according to factory numbers.

Matt Murphy resided in Miami, Florida until his death on June 15, 2018.

There is a story in
the Nashville Banner which reported on Warden Edwards' talk to the Nashville Exchange Club on the subject of prison reform in general, its aim and effectiveness, with its effectiveness demonstrated ''by the prisoner quintet, which entertained, Exchange Club
members. This group of Negro singers, which has already recorded several songs'', the paper reported approvingly, ''was loudly applauded by the civic club''.

JUNE 18, 1953 MONDAY

Martin Luther
King Jr, marries Coretta Scott on the lawn of her parents' house in her hometown of Heiberger, Alabama.

JUNE 19, 1953 FRIDAY

Carl
Smith recorded ''Satisfaction Guaranteed'' in a morning session at the Castle Studio in Nashville.

Pop singer Gwen Owens is born. She becomes a member of Hot, whose 1977 hit ''Angel In Your Arms'' is remade as a country hit by Barbara Mandrell in 1985.

JUNE 23, 1953 MONDAY

Pake McEntire is born in Chokie, Oklahoma. The older brother of Reba McEntire, he picks up a Top 10 hit of his own in 1986 with ''Savin' My Love For You''.

The success of Jimmy Forrest's ''Night Train'' in 1952 extended hope to saxophonists everywhere. It seems to have inspired Raymond Hill's ''Long Gone Raymond'', and probably this track,
too.

01 - "BLUES TRAIN" - B.M.I. - 2:34

Composer: - Theautry "Tot" Randolph

Publisher: - Copyright Control

Matrix number: - None - Not Originally Issued

Recorded: - June 23, 1953

Released: - 1986

First appearance: - Charly Records (LP) 33rpm Sunbox 105 mono

SUN RECORDS - THE BLUES YEARS 1950 - 1956

Reissued: - 1996 Charly Records (CD) 500/200rpm CDSUNBOX
7-5-16 mono

SUN RECORDS - THE BLUES YEARS 1950 - 1958

A rare sax instrumental outing as executed by Theautry "Tot" Randolph. There's plenty of energy and enthusiasm here as the "Blues Train" rolls along, although it must be admitted that the baritone sax is an unusual
instrument to find occupying a solo role.

Here, Randolph's
baritone is pretty impassioned in comparison to Raymond Hill's earlier tenor style - but compared with Willie Johnson's guitar work on this track, even Raymond is asleep at the wheel! Johnson literally tears the session apart, ranging from some fiery unison
work to a solo lead-in which borders on the atonal.

Although not audible, alto man Charles Lloyd is credited with being on the session. Lloyd would have been fifteen at the time but was already an accomplished musician.
If he's heard on this recording, it's probably in the cheerleader section. Twenty-five years later he would become the flower child of the jazz world.

''The
Marshall's Daughter'' opens, with Tex Ritter singing the title track and Jimmy Wakely making a cameo appearance.

Bass player
Ralph Ezell is born in Union, Mississippi. As a member of Shenandoah, he plays a role in such hits as ''The Church On Cumberland Road'', ''Janie Baker's Love Slave'' and ''Two Dozen Roses''.

Columbia released Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper's ''Are You Walking And A-Talking For The Lord''. The recording is judged among
country's 500 all-time greatest singles in the Country Music Foundation book ''Heartaches By The Number"..

Columbia released Carl Smith's ''Hey Joe!''.

JUNE
27, 1953 SATURDAY

Mercury released Rusty Draper's ''Gambler's
Guitar''.

JUNE 29, 1953 MONDAY

Decca released Rex Allen's ''Crying In The Chapel''.

Capitol released Jimmy Heap's ''Release Me''.

JUNE 30, 1953 TUESDAY

The Sun recording files show that Rufus Thomas went into the studio to cut "Tiger Man" on the last day of June. Houston Stokes remained on drums, but Rufus did not have Joe
Hill Louis along since Floyd Murphy is listed as guitarist, and indeed is audibly present. Whatever Louis was unavailable or whether he had been cut out of being the featured artist on his own song we can only guess. Certainly,
he found that when Rufus's recording was released, half the composing credit went to Phillips' wife under her maiden name of Burns. There were three other musicians new to Rufus's session but who were stalwarts of Sam Phillips' blues recording
sessions: James Wheeler on tenor sax, Bill Johnson on piano and Kenneth Banks on bass. A slightly bigger band, but Sun was still operating on a budget and it was logged that the session men were paid just ten dollars each on the day.

As on "Bear Cat", the band contributed well to the mayhem Rufus created on "Tiger Man", but
it was again the vocal that look most of a listener's attention. Compared to Joe Hill Louis’s own very good blues vocals on his version, Rufus now added the performance factor to the song - from the Tarzan calls at the start to the hoarsely
shouted lyrics and the Tarzan outre - taking it to a sphere Louis could not match for power and mischief. Floyd Murphy play some fine fills and takes a flowing solo of the kind heard on Junior Parker's contemporary Sun recordings.
Marion Keisker noted that the master of "Tiger Man" was "cut 4 on the second tape", and so Rufus may have made any number of attempts at the tune.

Gregarious and macho from day one as
a recording artist, Rufus Thomas was thirty-six years old when he recorded the hormonal exclamation "Tiger Man (King Of The Jungle)". Freshly-scribed by Sun stablemate, Joe Hill Louis, "Tiger Man" maintained Rufus' creature feature theme that began
with his rhythm and blues smash "Bear Cat", earlier in the year. Rolling tom toms, some wiry lead guitar and a set of chest beating howls added up to the kind of record that Rufus would play on his own radio show over WDIA, and he most likely did.

By this stage Rufus' menagerie was beginning to stock up, although thankfully, the funky chicken was still more than a decade away! Joe Hill Louis and Sam Burns (aka Sam Phillips)
were clearly hoping they were wearing their hit makers' hats when they concocted this one, whilst Murphy contributes a rather tasty repetitive guitar licks (which (*) Elvis Presley would copy note-for-note fifteen years later) and an effective, primitive
solo. Once again Rufus Thomas comes across as an engaging personality - but a somewhat limited singer, with ragged timing. Surprisingly, the disc failed to chart, and Rufus Thomas moved on to recording for Sam Phillips' local competitor Lester
Bihari, at Meteor Records.

(*) In 1968 when Elvis Presley filmed
his comeback 68' TV Special ''Elvis'', he revived ''Tiger Man'', replicating Louis's guitar licks as closely he could. It was dropped from the show and the accompanying LP, but soon appeared on a budget LP. The likeliest scenario is that Phillips had given
to to him in 1954 or 1955, suggesting that he might like to cover it for Sun. Introducing the song on-stage in 1970, Elvis said, ''This was my second record, 'cept no one got to hear it''. Louis would have benefited if Elvis had revived it in 1954 (he might
even have made enough for the tetanus shot that would have saved his life), but he wasn't around to collect his share of the 1970s bounty.

Fun-lovin, frivolous and wildly eccentric, Rufus Thomas
was unquestionably the clown prince of Sun Records. All of these attributes were on display when we met up in his hometown of Memphis, where he held court and played, as only he could, to the assembled gallery. Even so, there was another side to the
man. When the circumstances were correct, Rufus would sidestep the waggish nature of his recordings and settle down into a more mellow frame of mind as can be educed here below.

Was standard urban blues fare. For once,
Billboard was on target when it observed on September 26, 1953, "Its good advice but not a noteworthy record". This remains Thomas' finest city blues, and a welcome respite from the novelties which brought him such fame and success. Note that the
lyric refers to the Depression of 1929-1930, and updates a traditional theme. Thomas sings with confidence, and the band is in splendid from with Floyd Murphy etching a guitar pattern over the riffing sax of James Wheeler.

Rufus again shows what a good straight singer he could be, really opening out to shout
the pain of the lyric that remembered the Depression era, "when times were hard". Perhaps this was not the message people wanted to hear twenty years later. Certainly, the reviewer for Billboard was unimpressed, saying of the title, "It's good advice,
but not a noteworthy record". Actually, it was a rather good one but destined to be lost in the shadow of "Bear Cat" and "Tiger Man".

"Tiger Man" with "Save That Money" was issued at the end of September 1953 as SUN 188, once the sales of "Bear Cat" started to diminish and on the back of some publicity for Rufus
in the trade press that August and September: "Rufus Thomas of Sun Records" was on the 'Cool Train" show on WDIA every Saturday, and "Nat Williams and Rufus Thomas join together for three hours each Saturday as conductor and engineer of this popular
streamliner".

Name (Or. No. Of Instruments)

Rufus Thomas - Vocal

Floyd Matt Murphy - Guitar

James Wheeler - Tenor Saxophone

William "Struction" Bill Johnson - Piano

Kenneth Banks - Bass

Houston Stokes - Drums

Despite his continuing high profile locally, Rufus's "Tiger Man" was not the national rhythm and blues smash that Sun might have expected.
Billboard called it a novelty blues whose "lyric does not make much sense, but will get some attention because of its weird quality". It sold well but it not dent the charts. By the time it was released, Sun was handing a major hit with "Just Walkin'
In The Rain" by The Prisonaires vocal group, and it may be that Rufus's disc didn't quite get the extra promotion it otherwise would have had. The tiger had a second lease on life years later when recorded by Elvis Presley, but by then Joe Hill Louis
was no longer around to collect his write's royalties.

Surprisingly,
perhaps, there were to be no more Rufus Thomas records on Sun. Less surprisingly, maybe, in the light of comments that Rufus made to interviewers in later years. He told Peter Guralnick, "Me and Sam Phillips... we were tighter than the nuts on the
Brooklyn Bridge - then. Of course he was like all the folk at that time. You know how if blacks had something and didn't have no way to exploit it and the white dudes would pick it up and do something about it, they'd just beat him out of all of
it, that's all. Well, that was him, that was Sam Phillips. Oh man, I guess I lost a lot of it too, like most black folk". Talking to John Floyd in the 1990s, Rufus was even more to the point saying: "Sam Phillips was an arrogant bastard. He is today.
Back then he had a big car, a Bentley, and he'd boast about the money he made that got him this car, Yeah, but if it hadn't been for me, he wouldn't have had that car. I made the first record for him that got a hit". The truth, as usual, was multi-faceted,
and Sam was more likely scuffling at that time than driving a Bentley. Certainly, correspondence between Sam and his brother Jud makes it very clear how close to bankruptcy Sun Record was until Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash started to make hits in
1956.

Years later, during a European tour, Rufus once told writer
Roger St Pierre, rather dismissively: "Yeh, Sun was a blues label when it set out and we did "Bear Cat" which was a big smash... I cut a number of things for Sun, though I can't ever remember signing a contract". In fact, in Sun's books Marion Keisker
logged the fact that Rufus signed his contract with Sun on March 1953. He was paid on five occasions between March 23 and June 27 in advance royalties on "Bear Cat", totaling 275 dollars. He received three advance checks on "Tiger Man" between
August 1953 and February 1954, some 480 dollars, but after that the contract, and the record of payment, runs out.

Not long after Rufus Thomas's "Tiger Man" came out, Rufus was a usual deeply involved in radio WDIA's showpiece event of the year. Billboard of November 7, announced plans for the station's "Fifth annual Goodwill Revue for Handicapped Negro Children (which)
will present one of the strongest spiritual and rhythm and blues talent line-ups ever. A crowd of up to 60,000
(probably a typo for 6000) is expected to fill the Ellis Auditorium on December 4 to see B.B. King, Loyd Price, Muddy Waters, Eddie Boyd, Little Walter, Helen Thompson, the Soul Stirrers, and WDIA personalities Alex Bradford, the Caravans, Rufus Thomas, Moohah, the Spirit of Memphis Quarter, the Southern
Wonders and Al Jackson's band.

All the artists are giving their time in order to
raise money for the charity. And their diskeries - Specialty, Chess, United and Starmaker - are defraying their expenses". Interestingly, Sun Records was not mentioned. This may be an omission or it may have reflected a dispute
between Rufus and Sun. Even, perhaps, that Rufus was planning to record for a new label being set up in Memphis. WDIA had become known as The Goodwill Station because of its charitable and community based work, but it was also known
as the Starmaker station because singers like B.B. King and Rufus himself had started there, and a new Starmaker Records label was announced in November in Billboard as "The new label of David James Mattis, who started Duke
Records last year. Talent with the label includes Danny Day and Moohah, with records cut by those artists already being shipped out to the jocks and to stores. The label is affiliated with radio station WDIA". Mattis had set up Duke in
July 1952 and had scored immediate success with Memphis based singers including Johnny Ace, Rosco Gordon, and Bobby Bland, but Duke was soon taken over by Peacock Records in Texas. As it turned out, Starmaker did not last long enough
either to still be there at the end of Rufus's Sun contract in March 1954.

One of the Starmaker discs featured Rufus's fellow WDIA disc jockey and announcer, A. C. Moohah' Williams, who had the ''Wheelin'' On Beale show. Williams was still a biology teacher
at Manassas High School when he started at WDIA in 1949, but he soon became the first full time black employee of the station working on promotion and organisation of events as well as hosting shows. He set up the Teen Town Singers group
that changed personnel each year to include the best talent from all seven of the local black High Schools.

We have included his recordings, because it features a band of musicians led by tenor saxophonist Bill Fort that often worked with Rufus Thomas, and because it adds another
chapter to the 'Answer' song saga in Memphis.

Moohah's comical
song ''All Shook Out'' seems to have been the 'Answer' to Faye Adams' number one rhythm and blues hit ''Shake A Hand'' on Herald. Adams' disc had entered the charts that August and stayed for five months.

In their response, Moohah and Mattis had clearly taken the blueprint from ''Bear Cat'', perhaps hoping that Starmaker could be launched into
serious competition with Sun. The song may also have had secondary reference to the glad-handing that went on during the annual WDIA Goodwill Revue.

''All Shook Out'' and its other side, ''Candy'', were both driving rhythm and blues honkers in the tradition of Wynonie Harris, Roy Brown and other blues shouters. ''All Shook
Out'' opens deceptively slowly but soon stomps along in support of Moohah's nonsense lyric about the perils of hand shaking. There is a storming sax solo midway by Bill Fort and his tight band propels the whole performance
with piano and drums to the fore. Actually the song was not Moohah's but was written by David James Mattis, as was the flipside. On the record, ''Candy'' is about the girl who sweet-talks Moohah out of his mind. but David James said
he originally wrote the song about his dog.

Moohah's recordings
were issued on Starmaker 501 among the new rhythm and blues releases at the end of November, just in time for the Goodwill Revue. There was also a Starmaker 502 which contained two blues ballads by Memphis band singer Dick Cole recording
under the name Danny Day. ''You Scare Me'' and ''Wishing'', issued at the same time. There was also one gospel release by Bessie Griffin, '' Too Close To Heaven'', Starmaker 101, but these three seem to be all that the label issued. David
James told researcher George Moonoogian that the label failed because a WDIA secretary was too zealous in chasing up debts and threatened all his distributor contacts with legal action. Mattis was not the only one to try to get into
the rhythm and blues record business in Memphis in the middle 1950s. B.B. King had the Blues Boy Kingdom label and there was another short-lived label called Tan Town Records that issued recordings by the popular Spirit of Memphis
Quartet and others.

Rufus Thomas spent 1954 and most of the next
two years entrenched in his radio work and personal appearances and he did not record again until the end of 1956. He retained some kind of a national profile, being featured in the trade press occasionally. He was mentioned
as part of the publicity for the 1954 and 1955 Goodwill Revues but he had no record to promote at a Revue until 1956 when he joined Meteor Records, owned by Lester Bihari and situated in a black neighbourhood of Memphis.

Little is known about the short-lived Meteor episode and only two titles have survived from
the session or sessions Rufus made at their rudimentary studio on Chelsea Avenue. Nevertheless Meteor 5039, which coupled ''The Easy Livin' Plan'' and ''I'm Steady Holding On'' is a mighty record. As far as people can remember the band
was basically the musicians who played with Rufus regularly around Memphis, billed usually as the Bearcats. They included tenor saxophonists Evelyn Young, who had been on the Star Talent disc, and Harvey Simmons, along with
a rhythm section of Lewis Steinberg on bass and Jeff Greyer on drums. The band sets up a storming shuffle as Rufus delivers a clever lyric about how to live life on the ''The Easy Livin' Plan''. The almost chanted list of the teachers,
preachers, and the gambling men, the chauffeurs, stenographer girls, and Alabama bound sisters in the corner, all living life to the full, is an unforgettable moment in rhythm and blues lyricism. In contrast the slower paced
''I'm Steady Holding On'' is at once both a boastful and plaintive blues. Rufus told Peter Guralnick. ''I wrote one of the first songs that Bobby Bland ever sung: 'I got a new kind of loving that other men cant catch on/While they losing out
I'm steady holding on'. It was a good tune. Bobby sang it on the Amateur Show and won first prize''.

Jim Stewart was a bank teller and part-time country fiddle player when he set up Satellite Records in Memphis in 1958 with his sister, Estelle Axton. They started with country music and
then had an rhythm and blues group record by the Vel Tones that Rufus played on WDIA in 1959. Then on day in the spring of 1960, Rufus turned up at Stewart's new studio on McLemore Avenue pitching a song written by his daughter, Carla.
''Cause I Love You'' was recorded as a duet by Rufus and Carla and it became a small hit on Satellite 102 that summer. Carla's song ''Gee Whiz'' became a top ten rhythm and blues and popular hit the following year, by when
the label had become Stax Records.

In January 1963 Stax released
Rufus Thomas singing ''The Dog'', a dance tune he'd worked up after watching a girl dancing at a show in Millington. Tennessee. The song made number 22 in the rhythm and blues charts and was followed the next year by ''Walking The Dog'',
a number five rhythm and blues hit that also made the popular top ten in November 1963. It had taken ten years, but the entertaining man with the animal songs was back - and bigger than ever.

Rufus had other hits at Stax, but often said he didn't really fit into their operation. ''I wasn't
happy with the material they kept coming up with. They are great guys but they can't write or produce the song I need. The MGs are incredibly talented musicians but they have their style and they tended to imprint it too heavily on my
recordings''. Nevertheless, in 1970 he had another number five rhythm and blues hit with another improvised dance tune, this time made up at a club in Covington, Tennessee, titled ''Do The Funky Chicken''. Then at the start
of 1971 Rufus registered his first number one rhythm and blues hit with ''Do The Push And Pull''. It was followed with the almost as successful number two hit ''The Breakdown''. He continued to register smaller hits well into the 1970s,
twenty-five years after he had started his recording career, and to make well-received CD albums for many years after that.

On the back of his1960s hits, Rufus started to take his entertaining show out of Memphis, including to Europe. In December 1964 he was playing the Flamingo Club in London and the
Kilburn State Ballroom , safe in the knowledge that he had a radio job to go back to. He credits WDIAs program director, David James Mattis, for this: ''He let me go out on Saturdays and Friday nights and make air told me to go, and when
I came back I would always have my job there waiting for me. I could go on tour, and when I came back I knew everything was all right. Without David James just probably I would never have gotten where I got''.

Rufus played increasingly to white and mixed audiences and, despite his deep roots
in Beale Street and his sceticism about the way black artists were disadvantaged. he genuinely was happy to tell Peter Guralnick: ''College audiences are the greatest audiences in the world. I must have played every fraternity
house there was in the South. When we played Ole Miss they'd send the girls home at midnight, and then we'd tell nasty jokes and all that stuff. Oh man, we used to have some good times down there in Oxford''. He told Neil Slaven
in 1996, ''When I'm on stage and I look out there at that audience, I don't see colour. I see people packet in a place, there to see me. There is not a greater satisfaction in the world''. However, he added, ''There is no telling how
far I could have gone, had I been a white boy. I've always said that. I'm not bitter, I want you to know, but it does bother you''.

Rufus continued on Memphis radio with WDIA, then WLOK, and then WDIA again into the 1990s. He became the keeper of the blues flame, but he was open to other music. "I played
it all on my show. My family and I were raised on the Grand Ole Opry. Every Saturday night we'd run home to catch the Opry on the radio. So you can understand why I played Elvis Presley and I was the only black jock in the city that was playing
the Beatles and Rolling Stones when they came out''. Rufus appeared in various movies, from ''Wattstax'' in 1973 to ''Great Balls Of Fire'' in 1989 and ''Only The Strong Survive'', a D. A. Pennebaker film about rhythm and blues musicians.
Pennebaker said: ''You knew he was an old person, but he acted like a 16 year old. He was always full of funny takes on things and he always gave the impression he was a goofball. But when he talked about the music, you realised
he knew a lot''.

''His pipes remain as convincing as the rusty
hinges on an old barn door, said a reviewer when Rufus appeared in London in 1986, and those pipes continued to make make records. After Stax, Rufus was with u number of labels including Alligator in the 1980s and High Stacks
in the 1990s.

At age 81, in 1998, Rufus had triple bypass heart
surgery and was fitted with a pacemaker. His publicist at High Stacks Records said: ''When he went back in for tests before Christmas, he was so full of energy that hospitalising him was like putting a rabbit in a box. The other
patients have the benefit of his great smile and his constant jokes."

Rufus
continued to contribute to life and music in Memphis for another three years, enjoying his loves of baseball, ice cream, and black music, and embodying the philosophies he had dispensed to interviewers over the years. He had told Neil
Slaven, "You stop when you get old - and who's old? I've been to the school of hard knocks for all these years and that's where it comes from - Sidewalk University''. He told Louis Cantor, ''I've always worked several jobs
to try to make ends meet. And every time I think I've got my ends to meet, somebody comes up and moves the ends''. Talking of his music, he told Roger St. Pierr: "My stuff has got to be simple, direct. I figure that if you can whistle,
dance, sing, , hum, pop your fingers, it's just got to be a bigger hit.'

Thinking about his life as a black entertainer whose career developed beyond what he might have imagined , but at the same time feeling constricted by his colour, Rufus conceded. "I've gained quite a bit of popularity,
and when I die people are going to know about me. This is fine. But they could know about me a little better. I know I make good music. Good music that everybody likes."

Around Thanksgiving time in 2001, Rufus Thomas was hospitalised again and he died on December 15, in St Francis Hospital in Memphis,
aged 84. National newspapers marked the passing of the self-dubbed "World's Oldest Teenager," and the 'New York Times' called Rufus ''the jovial patriarch of Memphis soul", Towards the end of his life, Rufus had become the
official ''Ambassador To Beale Street''. Stax biographies talked about his flawless timing and innate skill in connecting to all people, his dedication to the craft of entertaining, his ability to put people at ease, and how he helped
others. Tennessee Governor Don Sundquist spoke about Rufus as an ambassador of unity: "He taught us not to see the world in black or white but in shades of blues''. Memphis renamed Hernando Street as Rufus Thomas Boulevard,
and he had his own car parking space near the site of the old Palace Theater. City mayor Willie Herenton described how he got the space: ''I had lunch with Rufus at a local cafe. And you know he had an ego, and he came to me and said,
you the mayor; well I need a parking space'. So we got him his space''.

Rufus no doubt enjoyed the mischief of making the mayor jump through hoops. ''You gotta have fun in life'', he once said. "Music to me is fun. You see me and you'll see how much fun I have with it. More, I'll bet, than
anybody else''.

WDIA RADIO - On June 7, 1947, WDIA radio station started as a pop and country station in Memphis,
located at 2074 Union Avenue, and changed to a black music format the following year. The station was used by David James Mattis to record Bobby "Blue" Bland, Rosco Gordon, Junior Parker, and Johnny Ace for the Duke label, had a minuscule
output of 250 watts. Even though it remained under white management by John R. Pepper and Bert Ferguson, WDIA - and to a lesser extent KWEM in West Memphis, Arkansas, and WLOK, also in Memphis - gave daily exposure to the artists
and their competitors.

Their principal medium was the fifteen-minute sponsored live show, a format that spawned B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, and
many more. The following year, however, Bert Ferguson shrewdly recognized that blacks were being ignored by local radio. He approached black businessmen with an idea for a black-oriented musical format, and they agreed to advertise.

When Nat D. Williams was hired, the station began its transition into a major blues force. A 50,000 watt transmitter turned it into one of the pre-eminent
radio stations in the South. After Rufus Thomas also went to work as a discjockey, the station not only became more popular, but the black community responded with strong support.

In many way, things couldn't have been going better. The Sun record company was making more and more of a name for itself. Sam Phillips finally owned his own home, and
at the end of June he put $1,050 into the radio station in order to shore up their application for an FCC (Federal Communications Commission) hearing. They had a $75,000 letter of credit from the First National Bank of Memphis, and, in an impressive feat of
creative bookkeeping, Sam Phillips was able to declare a net worth of $12,600, which included $8,200 for equipment and $1,500 (minus $300 still owed) for Jackie Brenston's bus. Sam's partner, Jim Bulleit, who proposed calling the station WBEE (''Before You
say no'', he wrote to Sam on May 13, ''listen to some of the ideas for promotion and publicity''), had a little harder time coming up with a comparable net worth (he included $3,000 of household furniture to reach a figure of $10,500) and, at Sam's prompting,
put together a resume that underscored his extensive experience in radio as well as whatever ''civic affiliations that you can point to with pride, with emphasis on the sympathetic understanding of the problems of the Negro''.